Class 

Book 

CppghtU?. 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT* 



j 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 



GERMANY AND 
ENGLAND 



By J. A. CRAMB, M.A. 

LATE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON 



WITH A PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION BY 

MOREBY ACKLOM 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & CO., PUBLISHERS 

1914 



,C7 



Copyright, 1914 

BY 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



XTbe IRntcketbocfcet ipcess, "fflcw J^orfe 

OCT -5 1314 

©GI.A380690 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 



More and more clearly as the days pass, the 
European war stands out as a supreme conflict 
between England and Germany. 

The nations may quarrel about the apportion- 
ment of the blame for the opening of the struggle ; 
but Belgium's neutrality, Russia's mobilization, 
Servia's self-respect — these were merely sparks 
that led to the explosion. The powder to which 
these sparks set fire had been' heaped up long since 
and added to every year. 

To America, English in speech and origin, and 
of late increasingly German in intellectual outlook, 
an understanding of the true causes of this colossal 
clash, an accurate comprehension of what Ger- 
many is fighting for, and what England is resisting, 
is of peculiar interest. 

In this little book, Professor Cramb, one of the 
few Englishmen profoundly saturated with Ger- 
man literature, German history, and German 
thought, shows how far back in history the motive 
of this conflict lies and why England and Ger- 
many, kindred people, both dowered with the 
spirit of empire, proud of the glorious past, are 
standing face to face, each in the other's way — 
and one of them hound to be humbled. 



vi 



PREFACE 



Since 1870, or from an even earlier date, the 
German mind has been dominated by the ideas of 
Treitschke, the leader of the Prussian school of 
history and philosophy, which includes Droysen, 
Haiisser and Sybel, Pertz and Delbriick. The 
greatness of Prussia, the fated world-mission of 
Germany under the supremacy of Prussia, is the 
inspiration of all these men. In their eyes there 
is only one obstacle to Germany's triumph, the 
British Empire. The predominance of Britain 
in world -politics is an insult, the mere existence 
of the British Empire is an affront to them. 
Treitschke attributes England's success to German 
preoccupation with higher and more spiritual 
ends; he looks on British colonial possessions as the 
result of ingenious theft, treachery, and underhand 
commercialism. Thus, to the German of to-day 
the British Empire and the world- trade which 
goes with it seem something of which his own 
nation has been unjustly deprived, and of which 
in the future his sword is to inevitably secure him 
the rightful possession. Hence the "Weltmacht 
oder Niedergang" battle-cry of Von Bernhardi 
and the militarists. 

On the other hand, Britain having through five 
centuries fought incessantly for her Empire, and 
having sacrificed incalculable treasure and in- 
numerable lives to this magnificent monument of 
her greatness, has now arrived at a point where she 
wishes to consider the scramble for territory and 



PREFACE 



vii 



the changing of boundaries as closed. She has 
entered upon the period of conservation; her will 
is for peace and security just as the German will 
is for war and acquisition. 

Professor Cramb, writing fifteen months before 
the war broke out, foresaw with the infallible eye 
of a master critic the symptoms of a gigantic 
conflict, as inevitable as the next sunrise, but 
which to England and her politicians was ab- 
solutely invisible and unthinkable. 

Animated by the most profound admiration for 
the heroic spirit of Germany, for its splendid 
traditions, for its world-circling ambition, he, in 
this book, warns his own countrymen of the 
German state of mind. Never has an Englishman 
before so entered into the German point of view, 
never has the German passion for empire been so 
sympathetically and so powerfully explained. 
Professor Cramb finds much to praise in the war- 
spirit; he looks on it as something which, like 
religion, is super-rational, and therefore not to be 
criticized by the standards of commerce and every- 
day life. 

The book is stimulating, suggestive, and nobly 
phrased. It will do more to put squarely before 
Americans the conflicting ideals at issue in the 
present war than all the writings of all the prolific 
newspaper critics. 

It will also serve to open the eyes of the well- 
meaning pacificists, who anticipate that at the 



viii 



PREFACE 



first considerable reverse on either side, the con- 
testants will naturally be willing to entertain 
offers of friendly mediation from the United States, 
to the fact that this is no mere match-contest for 
"points," but a grim, life-and-death grapple of 
two eternally opposite principles, one of which 
must be overcome before any peace worthy the 
name can come to Europe. 

Incidentally, it contains a warning for America 
which it would be a national blunder not to heed. 

Germany and England was put together from 
the last course of lectures which Professor Cramb 
delivered; and his sudden death, about this time 
last year, prevented him from working out the 
concluding part of his subject as fully as he had 
intended. 

The reader may not agree with all the ethical 
estimates of the author; but, even so, he can have 
no doubt that here is a very remarkable book 
indeed, full of fire, of insight, and of inspiration, 
a noteworthy herald of the terrific tempest which 
has since broken loose upon the world, even as 
the author predicted. 

MOREBY ACKLOM. 



New York, September 30, 1914. 



CONTENTS 



PREFACE BY MOREBY ACKLOM 

LECTURE I 
THE PROBLEM 

I. ENGLISH INDIFFERENCE TO GERMAN HIS- 
TORY AND LITERATURE 
II. SIGNIFICANCE OF "DEUTSCHLAND UND DER 
NACHSTE KRIEG" .... 

III. ORIGINS OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN 

GERMANY AND ENGLAND 

IV. THE INDICTMENT OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE 
V. SHALL A GERMAN EMPIRE SUCCEED IT? 

vi. lord Salisbury's warning . 

LECTURE II 

PEACE AND WAR 

i. England's offers and Germany's re- 
sponse ...... 

ii. the ideal of pacificism 

ix 



t CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III. CONCEPTIONS OF WAR IN THE PAST . . 58 

IV. THE IDEAL ELEMENT IN WAR AND IN ENG- 

LAND'S WARS FOR EMPIRE . 62 
V. VIEW OF WAR IN MODERN GERMANY . 70 

LECTURE III 
TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



I. 


HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE . 


75 


II. 


HIS REPRESENTATIVE POSITION 


78 


III. 


TREITSCHKE, MACAULAY, AND CARLYLE 


82 


IV. 


HIS CAREER ...... 


87 


v. 


HIS INFLUENCE AND GOVERNING IDEAS 


Q8 


VT. 


HIS 4TTITUDF TOWARDS FNGLAND AND 






HER EMPIRE ..... 


102 




LECTURE IV 






PAST AND FUTURE 




I. 


POSSIBILITY OF HISTORICAL FORECASTS 


IO9 


II. 


THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRES 


115 


III. 


THE PAST OF GERMANY, AND HER EMPIRE 






IN THE FUTURE ..... 


120 


IV. 


NAPOLEONISM IN GERMANY 


130 


V. 


THE ENGLISH CONCEPTION OF EMPIRE 


135 


VI. 


THE ISSUE FOR ENGLAND 


143 



GERMANY AND 
ENGLAND 



LECTURE I 

THE PROBLEM 
I 

The purpose of these lectures demands perhaps 
at the outset some explanation. First of all, I 
disclaim any intention to provoke or foster hostile 
feeling between Englishmen and Germans. My 
aim, rather, is to contribute, as far as one can 
by encouragement and exhortation, to a mutual 
understanding between those of the two countries 
whom my words may reach. But the forces 
which determine the actions of empires and great 
nations are deep hidden and not easily affected 
by words or even by feelings of hostility or friend- 
ship. They lie beyond the wishes or intentions 
of the individuals composing those nations. They 
may even be contrary to those wishes and those 
intentions. Individual friendship or hate has a 
very fugitive and uncertain influence on war and 

i 



2 



THE PROBLEM 



peace; and the good or evil will, even of great 
numbers of private persons, has little effect on the 
ultimate motives that control the actions of 
States. It may be questioned whether in the 
twentieth century any plebiscite would ever be in 
favour of war. At the time of the Pashoda inci- 
dent there were probably in France as many 
individual Frenchmen who entertained kindly feel- 
ings towards individual Englishmen as there are 
private persons entertaining such feelings to-day 
under the Entente Cordiale ; and they had probably 
just as much influence on the reciprocal relations 
of the two governments. The history of the 
Republics of Hellas and of Italy is but a large 
comment on this theme. You may study its 
amplification in the two greatest philosophic 
historians of all time — Thucydides and Machia- 
velli. Napoleon understood this. " Politics is 
Destiny," he said on one occasion. " La politique, 
c'est la fatalite." 

What then is my purpose? I answer in the 
words of a German historian, "To see things as 
in very deed they are." The prayer of Ajax in 
the dire extremity of the Greeks at Troy was for 
light that he might see his enemy's face. It is a 
noble prayer. What other prayer should be 
England's now? 

The object, therefore, which I have immediately 
in view is to stress the value, if not the necessity, 
to Englishmen of a deeper understanding of 



THE NEED OF UNDERSTANDING 3 



Germany, a deeper understanding of that great 
nation's political temper, its history, the motives 
of the actors who, in the past, have seemed to 
control that history; the development of its insti- 
tutions and its laws, its poetry and its literature — 
ever the highest instructors in the aspirations of a 
race 1 ; its present dreams and their relations to its 
past disillusionments or defeats. For in the 
history of nations there is a Fate, an inexorable 
nexus of things, which constantly arrests and con- 
stantly eludes our scrutiny, making the sequence 
of events in the history of such a people now seem 
inevitable as some dark and purposeful drama, 
now controlled by laws more akin to Nature and 
the elements than to the motives of human action. 

Whether we regard Germany as a friend or as a 
foe, the aims and ideals of that nation, some ephem- 
eral, some so deeply rooted in the past that they 
are beyond the power of the present to modify, 
are the aims and ideals which must singularly 
affect England in the present and are likely to con- 

1 There is no such stainless mirror of a nation's soul as German 
literature. In every age it is racy of German earth, going the 
round of its rivers and mountains and valleys. In the thirteenth 
century it is in Thuringia, the feudal castles; in the sixteenth, 
Saxony gives its tone to Reformation literature and hymns; the 
varied art of Silesia dominates the seventeenth, as that of Suabia 
the eighteenth century. Romanticism has its home in Berlin ; the 
fatalism of Vienna and Munich succeeds "Young Germany"; and 
in the twentieth century Berlin again leads in this, one of the 
greatest of world-literatures. 



4 



THE PROBLEM 



tinue to effect England, beyond those of any other 
nation, for several generations to come. 

If Germany is our enemy of enemies, if the 
twentieth century is to witness such a conflict for 
empire as that of England against France in the 
eighteenth century, or against Spain in the six- 
teenth, what is more imperative than that we 
should understand the spiritual as well as the 
material resources of that enemy, than that we 
should seek to discover the hidden foundations 
of its strength and probe the most secret motives 
of its actions, the characterizing traits of its policy, 
the deep convictions which mould the history of 
the nation? For with nations as with individuals, 
it is character that counts; he that wills greatly, 
conquers greatly. 

If, on the other hand, Germany is to be Eng- 
land's friend, perhaps even her ally, if blood indeed 
be thicker than water, then perfect mutual un- 
derstanding, the earnest scrutiny of our separate 
aspirations as they emerge from our separate 
pasts, can only strengthen that friendship and 
render that alliance more enduring. For there is 
no surer basis of friendship, whether between 
individuals or nations, than the sympathy that is 
born of knowledge and the knowledge that, in 
turn, is produced by sympathy. 

Yet how far from that knowledge and how in- 
different to its attainment are the majority of 
Englishmen in these times! Germany has one of 



NEGLECT OF GERMAN LITERATURE 5 



the greatest and most profound schools of poetry 
— yet how many Englishmen have the secret of 
its high places or access to its templed wonders? 
Since the decline of Alexandria there has been no 
such group of daring thinkers as those of Germany 
in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 
turies; yet to most English men and women the 
" Critique of Pure Reason" and the larger version 
of Hegel's "Logic" are sealed as the "Enneads" 
of Plotinus. 

Merely as an unexampled opportunity for the 
study of the soul of a people why should England 
neglect this literature? Vv 7 hy in 191 3 should the 
following characteristic incident be even possible? 
A few weeks ago the head master of one of our 
public schools exhumed a letter of the late Mr, 
Gladstone, in which that eminent politician cast 
a slur upon the whole of German literature, de- 
nouncing the author of "Faust" and of "Iphigenie" 
as an immoral writer in whose works we find vir- 
tue banished and self-indulgence reigning. Yet 
Goethe is, perhaps, the most serene artist in words 
since Sophocles, and amongst the children of men 
not one has striven with a loftier purpose to divine, 
even though darkly, the bond of the Many and 
the One, and thus to justify the ways of God to 
man and of man to God. That in the welter of 
literary opinions, published and unpublished, of 
the late Mr. Gladstone, such a verdict on Goethe 
and on German literature should exist is not 



6 



THE PROBLEM 



astonishing. The astonishing thing is that in the 
second decade of the twentieth century an English- 
man should have been found who, having exhumed 
such a verdict, did not from very shame instantly 
cover it again in complete oblivion. Instead of 
this, he incontinently published it in the 11 Times," 
not once only, but in two different issues. The 
publication of this letter is discreditable at once 
to the critic, to the exhumer, to the press and to 
the nation. 

I have neither the wish nor the hope that every 
Englishman should become a master of the Ger- 
man language "and a learned student of the philo- 
sophy or the poetry of Germany, its history or its 
politics. My ambition is more modest. It is 
the hope that during the next few decades there 
may gradually arise here in England a wall, as 
it were, of cultured opinion, which should make 
the blunt enunciation of such judgments by a 
prominent politician all but impossible by the 
ridicule to which they would at once expose him, 
and their ratification by the head master of one 
of our public schools absolutely unthinkable. 

I have no desire to labour the point, but it is 
difficult to pass in silence some of the most glaring 
instances of our indifference even at the universi- 
ties to German history and therefore to German 
politics. Not a page of Treitschke's greatest 
work has been translated; yet his history of the 
first stages of Prussia's wrestle for supremacy, 



A LITTLE LEARNING 



7 



his literary essays and his lectures on political 
theory, excite a more ardent curiosity in modern 
Germany than the essays and the history of Macau- 
lay did in mid-Victorian England. Giesebrecht's 
great history of the early Empire, with its vivid 
portraiture of the tragic figures of the Saxon and 
the Suabian lines, is still inaccessible to all but a 
small minority of Englishmen ; and its companion 
work, a masterpiece at once in erudition and in 
thought, as well as one of the most alluring of 
books, the " Verfassungsgeschichte 99 of Georg 
Waitz — are there fifty Englishmen living who have 
turned its grave and weighty pages or even heard 
its name? It would be easy to multiply instances; 
for German scholarship has not left a single period 
in its annals unillumined by some work which is 
marked by distinction or power and yet remains 
untranslated into English. 

Yet of Germany beyond most nations it holds 
good that he who would understand its present 
or its immediate future must be content patiently 
to search for the key to its hieroglyphics in the 
past; and, above all, he who would estimate at 
their true significance the regret for missed op- 
portunities of empire and the hopes of redeeming 
those opportunities which flit before the imagina- 
tion of thinkers like Treitschke, or soldiers like 
Bernhardi, must feel the spell which the shadowy 
grandeur of the lost empire of the Ottonides and 
the Hohenstaufen still exercises over the mind of 



8 



THE PROBLEM 



every German not sunk in sloth or chained to 
self-interest. 

And the average Englishman, thus denied by 
his ignorance of the language all access to this 
deeper knowledge — to what sources of information 
does he trust? We know them well. There is, 
for instance, the Radical member of Parliament 
who, liberated from the cares of State, spends 
three weeks in Berlin, consorts with members of 
the Reichstag, and finds each and all of them 
thoroughly well-disposed towards peace with all 
men and with England in particular. What 
scaremongers are these, he asks indignantly, who 
talk of German ambitions or a German invasion? 
Then there is the geographer and traveller who 
spends a somewhat longer period in the towns and 
villages of Brandenburg and West and East 
Prussia, and returns aghast at the intensity of 
hate which he found — at what he describes as 
"the all but insane desire for war with England' 9 
which animates every class of society. There is, 
again, the statistician who enumerates the mileage 
of German railways and German canals, of Berlin 
streets and Berlin drains; or, again, the English 
officer of a type not yet obsolete, who, preparing 
for the Intelligence Department of the War Office, 
spends three months in Germany and finds in it 
"a nation of damned professors.' ' 

Thus, seeking reality, we find only appear- 
ance, and, pursuing knowledge, we gain only 



PURPOSE OF THE LECTURES 



opinions — Boijat, in the strictest Greek sense of that 
term, 

This, then, is my general purpose in these 
lectures — to consider the deep strivings of German 
history; to understand what are the forces which 
are shaping the present in Germany, forces w r hich 
lie far deeper than such momentary ebullitions 
of goodwill as were expressed a short time ago 
by Admiral Tirpitz. These are but things of a 
day. It is in the past of Germany that we must 
seek the real springs of the future action of Ger- 
many, whether that future be against England or 
with England. 

II 

During the last few months there has been in 
the hands of a large number of Englishmen and 
of tens of thousands of Germans a very remarkable 
book — a book which has sprung from those deeper 
fountains of a nation's history to which I have 
referred. It is a book written in German by a 
distinguished cavalry soldier, General von Bern- 
hardi, and it has for its title and subject matter 
"Germany and the Next War " Deutschland 
und der nachste Krieg" — a problematical war, 
observe. What is the character of this work? 

One of many similar books which during the 
past ten or twelve years have been widely read 
in Germany, it has an extraordinary interest for 
us, and an interest of a many-sided kind. It is a 



10 



THE PROBLEM 



fair and a just book — according to the writer's 
insight; soldier-like in its simplicity, soldier-like 
in its misdirected literary admirations. It has a 
distinct significance, not only because of its mili- 
tary criticism, but because of its knowledge of 
German history and civilization; for General von 
Bernhardi is something of a scholar as well as a 
distinguished soldier. 1 Like many German offi- 
cers, he has attempted to understand not only his 
profession as a soldier but the "why" of that 
profession ; studying the history, the literature, the 
politics, and even the philosophy of his nation, 
seeking the answer to the question: What is 
Germany? 

And by "Germany" he understands the vital, 
onward-striving force flowing in German blood 
from an endless time down to the present, and from 
the present flowing onwards into an endless future. 
What, he asks, is the precise value, the precise 
significance of that force in its present mani- 
festation — "Germany"? And he has a perfectly 
definite answer: It is strife; it is war. And the 

1 1 have selected General von Bernhardt works not because 
of any peculiar or distinctive value in them, but because, of all 
that mass of literature from Treitschke to Delbruck, Schmoller, 
and Maurenbrecher, they are the sole exemplars in Englishmen's 
hands. For the rest, "Deutschland und der nachste Krieg, " like 
Bernhardi's earlier writings, is characterized by a certain diffuse- 
ness. He is a reader of Nietzsche, but his style shows not a trace 
of that master's pointed and lucid manner. It has, however, the 
merit of entire sincerity. 



WHAT IS GERMANY ? 



direction of that strife? It is the isolation of 
Russia by bribes; the destruction of the antago- 
nistic force named France beyond the power of 
raising her head; and thereafter Germany will be 
face to face with the day of reckoning with England. 
"The Hour" to which German officers of a Chau- 
vinist tendency drink, will then have struck. 

In the history of nations we must count time 
by decades or even by centuries. Under change- 
ful moods of furious declamatory anger, as in the 
crisis of the Boer War, and under the mood of 
momentary rapprochement of the present day in 
the crisis of the reawakening of the national spirit 
in France, this steady thought persists. That is 
one interest of the book. There is, again, the 
interest which centres in any attempt made by a 
German to explain to himself England and Ger- 
many in their relations to one another; and this 
is one of the underlying thoughts throughout the 
book. 

Again, the book has the interest derived from 
the fact that it represents a very strong trend of 
German, and, above all, of Prussian opinion— that 
accumulating mass of determined anti-Englishism. 
It is useless to see in Bernhardi's book the expres- 
sion of a morbid or heated Jingoism. It is no 
rhapsody on war. Bernhardi is not a man who 
takes any excessive pleasure in the contemplation 
of war; on the contrary! But he is a man who 
recognizes those darker, obscurer forces shaping 



12 



THE PROBLEM 



the destiny of nations. To him this war with 
England is inevitable. And his book is sympto- 
matic; that is to say, it represents the mood, the 
conviction, the fervent faith, of thousands and 
tens of thousands of Germans — Prussians, Saxons, 
Suabians, Bavarians. 

Its philosophy is derived from Nietzsche and 
Treitschke. In its military character the book is, 
like General von Bernhardt s other writings, emi- r 
nently up to date. But what marks out this work 
from all others of the same kind, giving it some- 
thing of the distinction of a really epoch-making 
book, is that it represents a definite attempt made 
by a German soldier to understand not merely 
how Germany could make war upon England most 
effectively, but why Germany ought to make war 
upon England. It is in this respect that the book 
focuses the thoughts of many German writers, 
historians, thinkers, novelists, pamphleteers, who, 
again and again, for quite the last forty years, 
have bent their attention to this subject. 

Is it possible to find any moral, any ethical 
justification for a war upon England? The war 
of 1870 with France was a war of great revenge, of 
just revenge, and for one of the greatest of causes. 
No war in history, perhaps, was ever more just 
than the war which Bismarck and Moltke waged 
against France. When she comes to this war upon 
England, on the other hand, Germany is face to 
face with the difficulty that here she has no such 



GERMANY'S INSTINCT FOR EMPIRE 13 



motive of retributive justice or revenge. And 
therefore you find a tendency to shape the question 
thus: How do England and her Empire stand in 
the path of the deepest desires and ambitions, and 
perhaps, also, the highest and most sacred aspira- 
tions of Germany? 

If we ask what those desires, ambitions, and 
aspirations are, the answer is this: Germany, not 
less than England, it is contended, is dowered with 
the genius for empire, that power in a race which, 
like genius in the artist, must express itself or 
destroy its possessor. An empire she once had, 
centuries before France and England fought. 
That empire is lost. But in the German race the 
instinct for empire is as ancient and as deeply 
rooted as it is in the English race; and in the 
Germany of the present time, above all, this 
instinct, by reason of the very strength of Germany 
within herself, her conscious and vital energy, her 
sense of deep and repressed forces, is not a mere 
cloud in the brain, but is almost an imperious 
necessity. This is the real driving-force in Ger- 
man politics, the essential thing. 

Hence the further question which young Ger- 
many asks is the question which Treitschke asks: 
At what point in her history did Germany swerve 
from the path to empire? Can she again find 
that path, or is it irrecoverably lost? Germany, 
from her own inward resources, produces year by 
year greater surplus energy, mental and physical, 



14 



THE PROBLEM 



than any other nation in the world; yet year by 
year, by emigration to America, to England, and 
to other lands, that surplus energy is lost to her. 
Year by year are we to look on in impotent anger 
or in apathy whilst the best and most enterprising 
of our citizens quit the Fatherland and, living 
under other governments, cease to be Germans, 
bequeath their worth, that is to say their valour, 
to those nations who may be ultimately Germany's 
deadliest enemies? 

These are the problems which, at the present 
hour, press in upon the mind of every thinking 
German. They have been the study of serious 
historians like Oncken, Treitschke, Mommsen, 
Sybel, even of Droysen. They are the questions 
which find their answer in novelists, poets, publi- 
cists and politicians. Pamphleteers like Eisenhart 
and Bley here agree with men of academic rank 
like Schmoller and Maurenbrecher, Franke, and 
Mutter. 

And the answer now given to the further ques- 
tion, What stands in the way of those desires and 
aspirations? is: Germany has one enemy. One 
nation blocks the way. That nation is England. 

Thirty years ago this answer was vague; but 
since that period it has steadily grown more 
distinct; and since 1898 and the formation of the 
Navy League, since the South African War and 
the extraordinary outburst of political and per- 
sonal hatred against England at that time, it has 



ENGLAND BLOCKS THE WAY 



grown still more precise. Not Russia or Austria, 
unless secondarily, not France, unless incidentally, 
is Germany's enemy: the enemy of enemies is 
England. She bars the way to the realization of 
all that is highest in German life. 

The enemy having thus been ascertained, the 
question which every German has to face is: Why 
are we to submit to this? 

It is true that amongst Germans of every rank 
and class there are men willing to acknowledge 
the part w r hich England has played in the past, 
who are perfectly willing to admire our Shake- 
speare, our dramatists, some of our historians, 
and are even willing to extend a kind of tolerant 
contempt to some of our philosophers. But there 
are Germans of another kind, men of the type of 
Eisenhart and Bley, and, above all, of the type of 
Treitschke, whose attitude towards England is to- 
tally different. These men, as the justification for 
this war, this "nachste Krieg," point to the broad 
fact — broad enough, assuredly! — that the English 
race is the possessor, "by theft," as Treitschke de- 
scribed it, of one-fifth of the habitable globe. And 
they ask: "By what right? By the right first of 
craft, then of violence!" 1 German indignation 
then takes the place of German analysis. Cooped 
up between the North Sea and the Danube, the 

1 "In 1839, in the midst of a time of peace, the rock-nest of 
Aden, the key to the Red Sea, the Gibraltar of the East, was 
stolen." (Treitschke's "Deutsche Geschichte, "vol. V., p. 63.) 



16 THE PROBLEM 

Rhine and the plains of Poland, conscious of our 
strength, exerting an ever stronger pressure upon 
our frontiers — can we or ought we, it is asked, to 
acquiesce in England's possession of one-fifth of 
the globe? Ought a patriotic German to submit to 
seeing his nation depleted year by year? Can he, 
on those conditions, retain his manhood or be true 
to the religion of valour, the birthright of the 
Teutonic kindred? It is very well for England to 
protest that she has no aggressive designs against 
Germany; England's mere existence as an empire 
is a continuous aggression. So long as England, the 
great robber-State, retains her booty, the spoils of 
a world, what right has she to expect peace from 
the nations? England possesses everything and 
can do nothing. Germany possesses nothing and 
could do everything. What edict then, human 
or divine, enjoins us to sit still? For what are 
England's title-deeds, and by what laws does she 
justify her possession? By the law of valour, 
indeed, but also by opportunity, treachery, and 
violence. 1 

1 It is impossible in Germany to ignore the force of literary and 
academic ideas. Just such a series of irrelevant and inflam- 
matory declamation, partly the work of the Tugendbund, partly 
the work of men like Arndt and even Stein, preceded the rising 
against Napoleon; and in a later decade just such a series pre- 
ceded the war against Austria and the war against France. The 
causes of the wars of 1866 and 1870 can be so treated as to appear 
the work of professors and historians. What is Droysen's 
"History" but a pamphlet in six volumes in which Prussia stands 



A SHIFTED QUESTION 



17 



In the time of Roon and Moltke the attitude of 
Germans when the question of enmity to England 
was discussed was always, "Is it possible to land 
a German army upon English soil? And, once 
landed there, how is it possible to bring it safely 
back again with its plunder to the shores of the 
Elbe and the Rhine ?" What was argued was a 
problem of abstract strategy, rather than of 
political or national aim. 

A generation has passed. The heroes of the 
war of 1870 have one by one disappeared — Bis- 
marck, Roon, Moltke, Manteuffel. That prob- 
lem of strategy does still exist in Germany, but 
it occupies a much less prominent place than it 
occupied thirty or forty years ago. It seems to 
have solved itself during the last ten or fifteen 
years. It has become a secondary matter, and 
the quasi-historical form which the question of 
enmity to England now assumes in the minds of 
thousands of intellectual Germans is this: As the 
first great united action of the Germans as a 
people, when they became conscious of their 
power, was the overthrow of the Roman Empire, 
and ultimately, in Charlemagne and the Ottonides, 
the realization of the dream of Alaric— the trans- 
figuration of the world, the subversion of Rome, 



out as the model State? And the " French Revolution " of Sybel 
is a counterpart of the writings of Droysen and Treitschke in its 
arraignment of the French nation. 
2 



18 



THE PROBLEM 



and the erection upon its ruins of a new State; so, 
in the twentieth century, now that Germany under 
the Hohenzollern has become conscious of her 
new life, shall her first great action be the over- 
throw of that empire most corresponding to the 
Roman Empire, which in the dawn of her history 
she overthrew? In German history the old 
Imperialism begins by the destruction of Rome. 
Will the new Imperialism begin by the destruction 
of England? 

Ill 

The ethico-political or moral origins of the 
sentiment of antagonism between England and 
Germany are thus obvious enough — the confron- 
tation of two States, each dowered with the genius 
for empire; the one, the elder, already sated with 
the experience and the glories of empire ; the other, 
the younger, apparently exhaustless in resources 
and energy, baulked in mid-career by "fate and 
metaphysical aid/' and now indignant. 

This is 'the moral, the most profound source of 
antagonism; and its roots lie deep in European 
history — German historians as widely apart in 
mind as Hegel and Treitschke seeing the cause of 
Germany's frustrate destiny in her pursuit of 
ideal ends, of "the freedom of the spirit"; in her 
deep absorption in religion at the period when 
England, Holland, France, Spain, fired by com- 



RELATIONS WITH PRUSSIA 



19 



mercialism, played against each other for the 
dominion of this planet. This is clear: this is the 
ethical, the permanent and the real cause. It has 
the characteristics of all true causes: universality 
and necessity. And it is worth while pausing at 
this point to ask the question : What is its historical 
genesis? 

The unity of modern Germany is the work of 
Prussia and the great Hohenzollern dynasty. 
What are the stages in the evolution of the rela- 
tions between England and Prussia? There are 
four distinct phases: the period of Frederick the 
Great, the Napoleonic, the mid-nineteenth century 
and the later nineteenth century. 

The definite relations of England and Prussia 
as State to State are synchronous with the history 
of Prussia as a kingdom; and in the first decades 
the terms are those of friendship. The son of the 
Great Elector, Frederick I, as first King of Prussia, 
sends his contingent to support Marlborough and 
Eugene. During Frederick the Great's time, Eng- 
land's relations to Prussia, beginning in hostility, 
owing to the sympathy of the English people 
for Maria Theresa, and their enmity to France, 
pass through a phase of variegated sullen friend- 
ship and alliance, and end again, at least on 
Frederick's part, in clear burning hostility and 
contempt when the government of Lord Bute 
abandons Prussia. Minor German historians have 
dwelt much on 1762 and the "betrayal" of 



20 



THE PROBLEM 



Frederick by the Cabinet of St. James's in the 
hour of his darkest fortunes. 1 Frederick, in his 
correspondence on the subject, does not spare the 
character of Lbrd Bute; but he is too profound 
an observer of the life of States, and too frequent 
a student of "II Principe" and, above all, of 
"Gli-Discorsi," not to know that alliances between 
States are based on self-interest. 

A generation passes. At the time of the Revo- 
lutionary and Napoleonic wars, England is for 
nearly eight years the enemy of Prussia, the enemy, 
that is to say, of Napoleon's ally, or Napoleon's 
tributary State. Then in 1813, 1814, and 1815, 
England stands side by side with Prussia, and 
this friendship is not interrupted during the Holy 
Alliance, though it is easy to trace distrust and 
misgiving in the attitude of actual Prussians or of 
" nationalized' 9 Prussians, Prussians by sympathy 
like Niebuhr and Stein. These die. " They see," 
I have elsewhere said, "the world rushing upon 
ruin; they see the unchaining of anarchy. But 
what do they hope from England? England, 
faster than all the rest, is plunging down the steep." 

With the Revolution of February, 1848, with 
1870 and 1875, ^ * s possible already to discern the 

r The "Annual Register," which began in 1758, is, in its first 
numbers, full of proofs of the admiration felt by England for 
the King of Prussia. The Buckingham Correspondence indicates 
that Frederick's proud hostility was not to the nation, but to 
Bute. 



RISE AND TRIUMPH OF PRUSSIA 21 



rise of the present hostility. And the underlying 
cause, the causa causans? It is interesting; it is 
curious; it presents one of those movements, one 
of those visible invisible " curves'" traced in the 
Unseen, which in history affect the imagination 
like the great achievements in art. The workshop 
is flung open; we seem to witness the very opera- 
tion of Fate; the Norns are weaving the destinies 
of men. 

This causa causans is not England. England 
is passive. The active agent is Prussia. Stage 
by stage from the days of the Great Elector Prussia 
has risen, guarding each advance with a Roman 
precision and care. Under her first two kings, 
Frederick I and Frederick William I, as under 
the Great Elector, Prussia is admirable in her 
self-restraint. Her aim is to secure the territory 
extorted from the Swedes at Fehrbellin and to 
organize the new kingdom. She does not as yet 
even come forward as Austria's antagonist, 
despite ultra-Habsburg treachery, ultra-ITabsburg 
insolence. 

Prussia strikes when her hour strikes, and in 
1740, with the accession of Frederick the Great, 
that hour does strike; and for the next twenty- 
three years Prussia appears as the great rebel- 
State, asserting herself triumphantly, measuring 
herself in battle after battle against Austria and 
Austria's allies. All Europe cannot break her 
spirit or the spirit of her king. 



22 



THE PROBLEM 



It is one of the lofty and exhilarating heroisms 
of world-history, this conflict of reality against 
empty formalism; of the substance of Frederick's 
military State against that phantom, the Army of 
the Empire ; of right and strength against boastful 
weakness parading as power, unrighteous privi- 
lege decking itself with the sanctity of history and 
right. 1 

Nothing is more merciless than Frederick's 
mockery of that venerable myth, the Holy Roman 
Empire. We hear already Frosch's song in 
"Faust": 

"Das liebe, heil'ge, Rom'sche Reich 
Wie halt's nur noch zusammen?" 

If the conflict at times is tragic, as in 1759 it 
becomes tragic, it is always heroic tragedy. 
Frederick's poetry before Rossbach moves us as 
the midnight talk of Achilles and Priam — the 
sorrow and the heroism in things : 

'Pour moi, menace du naufrage, 
Je dois, en affrontant Forage, 
Penser, vivre et mourir en roi. " 

1 "His statecraft bears on its face the stamp of his own kingly 
frankness. In the conflicts of States he had regard only for 
living things, for power skilfully utilized through rapid action. 
He gave truth once more a place of honour in German politics. " 
(Treitschke's " Deutsche Geschichte," vol. L, pp. 49-50.) 



THE WAR OF LIBERATION 



23 



And again we have at once to admire Prussia's 
irresistible and resolute advance and her strict re- 
straint. Definitely she comes forward as Austria's 
rival; but the hour for Austria's overthrow has 
not yet come. Frederick's army and the entrain 
of success might have led, after 1763, into wars 
for world-empire which would have recalled those 
of Louis XIV and anticipated those of Napoleon. 
The king is not yet old — the age of Marlborough 
at Blenheim, of Cassar at Munda. In Treitschke's 
theory, Frederick is conscious in himself of mili- 
tary genius like that of Alexander, yet is con- 
tent with Prussia. Even when such men as 
Winterfelt or Dessau propose the Empire, he 
answers them: "No; it would be too awkward a 
burden." 

Two generations pass. The War of Liberation 
follows, investing Prussia with a glory such as the 
war against Xerxes gave Athens. Blucher, Stein, 
Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Arndt, Korner, Fichte, 
Kleist, Uhland, form a galaxy of heroism on 
which, between 1815 and 1848, the imagination of 
Young Germany broods not less ardently than, in 
an earlier generation, the contemporaries of Goethe 
and Herder had studied in Plutarch the heroic 
phantoms of Greece and of Rome. Then, when 
a century has passed since Frederick's wars, the 
task which, greatly daring, he declined, Prussia, 
greatly, wisely daring, now can undertake. The 
hour has once more struck. And at Sadowa and 



24 



THE PROBLEM 



at Metz, Worth and Sedan, she founds the new 
German nation and the new German empire. 1 

What is to be the next stage? Germany after 
1870 finds a greater strength and a sense of more 
complicated and intricate unity than she ever 
possessed in the days of mediaeval Imperialism; 
and in the House of Hohenzollern the new nation 
has found, in answer to all its aspirations, a dynasty 
not less heroic, not less great than the Ottonides 
or even the Hohenstaufen. 

Now it is just at this moment in her history that 
Germany comes sharp up against England, as in 
the eighteenth century she comes up against 
Austria, and in the nineteenth against France. 
Yet in her past relations to England, Prussia, it 
may seem at first, can find no cause, personal and 
rancorous, such as animates her in 1760 or in 
1870. From Austria and from France she had 
endured insult upon insult, measureless humilia- 
tions. But from England? 

England's possessions, England's arrogance on 
the seas, her claim to world-wide empire — these, 
Germany answers, are to Germany an insult not 
less humiliating than any she has met with in 
her past. And what are these English preten- 
sions? And upon what are they based? Not 
upon England's supremacy in character or intel- 

1 Bismarck now is not content with Prussia; he is for empire, 
though again temperate — "I wish to be an honest broker. " 



ENGLAND'S BASELESS SUPREMACY 25 



lect. For what is the character of this race which 
thus possesses a fifth of the habitable globe and 
stands for ever in the path of Germany's course 
towards her "place in the sun," in the path of 
Germany's course towards empire? 

It is from this first recrimination that, during 
the last three or four decades, largely under the 
influence of the Prussian School of History, there 
has been evolved a portrait of England as the 
great robber-State. In one phase or another this 
conception is gradually permeating all classes, 
making itself apparent now in a character in 
fiction, now in a poem, now in a work of history 
or economics, now in the lecture-hall at Bonn or 
Heidelberg or Berlin, now in a political speech. 

And the theme is precise. England's suprem- 
acy is an unreality, her political power is as 
hollow as her moral virtues ; the one an arrogance 
and pretence, the other hypocrisy. She cannot 
long maintain that baseless supremacy. On the 
sea she is rapidly being approached by other 
Powers; her resources, except by immigration, 
are almost stationary, and her very immigration 
debases still further her resources. Her decline 
is certain. There may be no war. The display 
of power may be enough, and England after 1900, 
like Venice after 1500, will gradually atrophy, 
sunk in torpor. An England insensibly weakened 
by brutalization within and the encroachments 
of an ever-increasing alien element, diseased or 



26 



THE PROBLEM 



criminal, and, by concession on concession with- 
out, sinking into a subject province though nomi- 
nally free, whilst Canada, South Africa, Australia, 
New Zealand, carves out each its own destiny — 
such an England is easily conceived. 

Who is to succeed her? It may not be Ger- 
many; some Power it must be. But if Germany 
were to inherit the sceptre which is falling from 
her nerveless hands . . . ? 

And, having visualized this future, the German 
imagination, in a tempest of envy or vehement 
hate, becomes articulate and takes various shapes* 
resulting in an almost complete arraignment of 
the British Empire, of the English character, and 
of all our institutions and all our efforts as an 
empire-building race. 

IV 

First there is the general indictment of British 
Imperialism as an influence upon humanity. You 
acquired your empire, these critics say, by meas- 
ureless treachery, violence, the perfidious foment- 
ing of strife, and you have failed as an empire at 
once in your colonies and in your dependencies. 
Your colonies already shiver with impatience under 
the last slight remnant of your yoke. The arro- 
gance or the clumsiness of some beef-witted minis- 
ter will alienate Canada or Australia exactly as 
the clumsiness of the Graftons, the Norths, the 



AN ARRAIGNMENT 



27 



Grenvilles, between 1763 and 1775, alienated the 
New England States. 

Then the German Cultur-Intperialisten, not un- 
affected probably by the study of Mommsen or of 
Curtius, certainly strongly influenced by the study 
of Dahn and Nietzsche, arraign the century and a 
half of our rule in India. " Your dominion,' 1 they 
say, "has been retrograde and obscurantist. India 
is not only the Italy of Asia ; it is not only the land 
of romance, of art and beauty. It is in religion 
earth's central shrine. India is religion. Yet 
what consciousness of this have Englishmen ever 
exhibited? You came to India with an opium 
pipe in one hand and a Bible in the other. India, 
seeking dreams, accepted with the passion of de- 
spair the opium; it gave her dreams. Your Bible 
she rejected with measureless contempt, and she 
awoke from her opium sleep to fasten her eyes and 
her soul with new ardour, new adoration, on the 
great scriptures of her race. Yet the officers of 
your army and your civil administrators are in- 
capable of reading a page of those scriptures. 
Instead of seizing the opportunity of a new and 
great religious experiment, you, the conquerors — 
borrowers of your own religion — have come to the 
most original race of this planet and asked them 
to borrow from the borrowers ! 

"With what contempt for the conquerors must 
not the Brahmin, sunk in the studies of those vast 
and austere conceptions which by the vanished 



28 



THE PROBLEM 



stream of the Saraswati first allured the human 
soul, rise at midnight from his studies and, as he 
walks to and fro under the stars, console himself 
for his lost nationality by pondering the problem, 
poignant in its sarcasm as in its pathos : Which is 
the greater humiliation to a race, to be indebted 
to another for its government or to be indebted to 
another for its religion? Germany, on the other 
hand, is year by year preparing to make this great 
religious experiment. The development of German 
thought, from Kant to Fichte, from Hegel and 
Schopenhauer to Lotze, Hartmann and Nietzsche, 
strives to no other term. 

"Thus in the spheres of religion and of thought 
you have failed to impress your dominion upon the 
Hindu imagination: the seed-fields of that failure 
are rolling on to the harvest. The verses of one of 
your own poets, pointless when applied to Rome 
and Egypt, acquire a bitter meaning when applied 
to England and India as but yesterday they were 
applied by one of Ramakrishna's disciples educated 
in England : 

" 'The East bowed low before the blast 
In patient, deep disdain, 
She let the legions thunder past 
And plunged in thought again. 9 

" Nevertheless, though thus failing in religion, 
you might have succeeded as Consular Rome suc- 
ceeded in Hellas. Failing to impress your domin- 
ion on India by sovereignty of mind or by the 



ENGLAND'S FAILURE IN INDIA 29 



daring of speculative thought, you might still have 
impressed the imagination of the Hindu by your 
valour and by your organized strength in war. 
To the three hundred millions of Hindus you 
might have presented yourselves as a great Kshat- 
riya race, a nation of warriors. Instead of this you 
attempt to hold India with almost fewer legions 
than Rome required to govern the original de- 
spicable race of Britannia. You invite hundreds of 
young Hindus of ancient lineage to your universi- 
ties and to your schools. With what feelings must 
they read the tirades against a Nation in Arms, 
the litanies in praise of peace, which argue the 
slave and the coward at heart ! Instead of a nation 
of Kshatriyas you appear as a nation of Vaisyas — 
a nation of shopkeepers indeed ! You alone of the 
nations of Europe in the twentieth century still 
possess a mercenary army! Only at one period 
of your history, Treitschke affirms, did you ever 
possess a national army, and that was in the time 
of Cromwell. 1 When Englishmen ceased to be 
soldiers they forfeited their right to govern India 
in perpetuity. 

"Thus in India you have failed conspicuously, 
ignobly and completely, because as a government 
and as a nation you have lost, if you ever possessed 
them, the three qualities revered by the Hindu 
race — creative genius in religion, the valour in 
arms of a military caste, and the pride of birth of 

1 Treitschke's "Politik," vol. II., p. 358. 



30 



THE PROBLEM 



the rajah. But chiefly you have failed because you 
have ceased to be soldiers ; because you dread war ; 
because you present to the whole world the spec- 
tacle which the world has not seen since the fall of 
the Byzantine Empire — a timorous, craven nation 
trusting to its fleet. 

" And as you have failed in India, so you will fail 
in Egypt, which, next to India, is the most sacred 
region on this earth. As yet you have succeeded 
only in vulgarizing it. The Mamelukes spared the 
majesty of the Pyramids. Napoleon, turning from 
them, could make his great appeal, 1 Soldiers, forty 
centuries look down upon your actions ! ' But you 
crept into possession of Egypt, by the weakness of 
France, like a fox creeping into a farm-steading." 

A different group of critics direct the indictment 
against various aspects of our civic and national 
life, against our morals, the administration of our 
laws, our universities, and even against that palla- 
dium, that happy via media, the Anglican Church. 
It is affirmed with regard to the national religion of 
England that that religion which we are proud of 
naming "Catholic" nevertheless is the most pro- 
vincial of all the creeds born of the Reformation. 
Luther, Calvin, even Zwingli, can claim adherents 
in other countries than those in which the faith of 
each was founded. But Anglicanism — where are the 
proselytes from other nations who have adopted 
that as their life-giving hope? And its annals 
since its institution are as barren or as provincial 



CHURCH AND UNIVERSITY CRITICS 31 



as its doctrine and its ritual. What single name of 
European power in the eighteenth or nineteenth 
centuries has it produced? And at the present 
hour it has not a bishop whose name is known 
beyond the boundaries of his own diocese, or a 
single theologian who has any claim to the atten- 
tion of mankind except such as is derived from his 
study of the German masters in his own science. 
And even in the sphere of theological criticism 
where is the English Reuss or Renan, where is the 
English Friedrich Strauss? 

The criticism of our universities, rills from the 
German Parnassus, is so old and still so well justi- 
fied that it would be tedious to repeat it. A new 
touch is contributed by Dr. Karl Botticher, w T ho 
tells us in effect: "You govern millions who read 
their sacred books in the Sanscrit and Arabic 
characters; but the fairest specimens of those 
types are still cast in German fonts. A German 
taught you the meaning of the religion of that 
province which you regard as the brightest jewel 
in the English crown ; and to German scholarship 
you owe the initiatory impulse to study each of 
the four great world-religions of your empire — Mo- 
hammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and 
Brahminism. " Or again, it is pointed out that 
Macaulay, our greatest national historian, makes 
mistakes in philosophy which no German Fuchs 
would commit. 1 

1 "Macaulay exhibits a lack of philosophic culture that abso- 



32 



THE PROBLEM 



Contained also in this indictment is the charge 
against English law, arising out of the English 
Press criticisms of the German trials of English 
spies a short time ago. It is asserted that here too 
England is taking the downward course. 

The critics pass on to consider other points of our 
life — our army, for instance, for which they have 
nothing but contempt. "You boast that the 
English flag is propped on the bones of the English 
dead; but from Blenheim to La Belle Alliance 1 
German valour was prodigal of German blood in 
winning your victories. Gibraltar itself was cap- 
tured for you by a foreign force led by a German 
prince; the right wing at Blenheim was scattered 
and the day lost when young Dessauer — not yet 
the old Dessauer — wrested victory from disaster; 2 



lutely amazes us Germans. He says things that with us no stu- 
dent would dare to say. ... A comparison of Ranke with 
Macaulay brings out the contrast between German profundity 
and English superficiality. " (Treitschke's "Politik," vol. II., 
p. 359.) Emerson's opinion, expressed in his "English Traits," 
is the same. 

1 " La Belle Alliance, 5 ' "Schonbund," the designation for Napo- 
leon's last battle consistently used by Prussian historians, e.g., 
Hausser, Sybel, Droysen, Schlosser. 

2 [Note. — This, of course, is an extreme instance of partial 
statement by such critics. At Blenheim the right wing {under 
Eugene) was never "scattered," though it was repulsed; it was 
not Dessau but Marlborough who changed his plan, concentrated 
on the French centre, and thus broke their line. At Gibraltar, the 
share of the fleet under Rooke, who first bombarded the town and 
then landed the capturing force, is ignored.] 



SOLDIER AND SUFFRAGETTE INDICTED 33 



and yet once more, on the 1 8th of June, 181 5, the 
advance of Bliicher and his corps of Prussians 
saved your army from annihilation. And did not 
Professor Delbriick inform us during the Boer War 
that your soldiers on the march chained Boer 
women together in order to form a screen to pro- 
tect themselves from the bullets of outraged hus- 
bands and fathers? And do we not know from 
discussions in our Kriegsschiile that your soldiers 
have laid down their arms when every tenth man, 
and sometimes every fifteenth man. was wounded; 
whereas in 1870 our Germans stood unyielding 
even when every third man was down? General 
von Bernhardt s opinion of your officers of higher 
grade is well known. " 1 

And finally, turning to English society, the in- 
dictment centres upon that movement towards 
Woman's Suffrage w T hich has characterized English 
life during the last two years. "Does not the 
Suffragette, loud-voiced, coarse-minded, stealing 
about like a thief with a hammer up her sleeve, 
represent English women to the civilized world ?" 
To this caricature they oppose the picture of the 
German woman, her virtues, her dignity and her 
simplicity. They cite the magnificent answer of 
the Prussian mother in the War of Liberation of 
181 3: "Who is the noblest woman?" "She who 

1 Bernhardi's opinion of our commanders is written all over his 
book, although he has the highest regard for the English private, 
for the rank and file. 
3 



34 



THE PROBLEM 



has given most sons to die for the Fatherland." 
Or they quote Queen Luise: "The children's 
world, that is world enough for me. M Yet she was 
capable of appreciating Goethe. German women, 
too, they assert, have gone to war; but German 
women make war, not against flower-beds or golf- 
links, insensate pillar-boxes or shop windows, but 
like soldiers against soldiers. They quote those 
tragic and pathetic incidents which occurred during 
the great Bejreiungskrieg exactly a hundred years 
ago ; and from that they go back four years earlier 
to those incidents which marked the battlefields in 
the heroic rising of the Prussian Schill in 1809, 
when in more than one instance, as the helmets of 
the dead were removed, a flood of golden hair 
rolled down from under the helmet to the waist of 
the fallen. That, they say, is how German women 
go to war. 

Now the accuracy or inaccuracy of the various 
counts in this indictment is irrelevant here; what 
concerns us is that, now on this point, now on that, 
it is accepted by thousands of Germans at the 
present day as a fair portraiture of England and 
the English. All Germans do not subscribe to all 
these counts, few Germans do not subscribe to 
some. It is vain to call this an echo of the Boer 
War; the longest echo does not last twelve years. 
Besides, what is more evident to history than that 
there was some deeper cause than Wilhelm II's 
telegram for that extraordinary outburst of hate? 



THE PLEA FOR DISARMAMENT 35 



The significance of this indictment is its moral 
scorn. And the inference drawn from it may be 
stated thus : How is the persistence of a great un- 
warlike Power sprawling Fafnir-wise across the 
planet to be tolerated by a nation of warriors? 
Ought not the arrogated world-supremacy of such 
a race to be challenged? He who strikes at Eng- 
land does not necessarily sin against the light or 
commit a crime against humanity. England is 
failing because she ought to fail. She is already 
straining to the utmost. This she betrays by her 
pleadings with Germany to disarm. Why should 
not Belgium or Paraguay, for that matter, propose 
to Germany to limit her armaments? How did 
England act towards Denmark in 1801 or again in 
1807? There you have the epitome of the entire 
history of England. But now that she feels her 
strength leaving her, now that her day is over, she 
talks to others of disarmament! It is the first 
time in history that such propositions have been 
made, and it is fitting enough that they should 
come from this hypocrite power. England may 
gradually sink from internal decay, as Venice 
gradually sank after 1500, dying of senility, until at 
a touch from Napoleon's sword she crumbled ; or, if 
she has spirit enough, England may perish from a 
bayonet-thrust to the heart. But perish she must. 
And the judgment of the great national historian of 
Germany is quoted — Heinrich von Treitschke, a 
man whose position is almost as if he were the 



36 



THE PROBLEM 



poet-laureate in prose of Bismarckism and of the 
Hohenzollern dynasty. In Treitschke's phrase, "a 
thing that is wholly a sham cannot in this universe 
of ours endure for ever. It may endure for a day, 
but its doom is certain ; there is no room for it in a 
world governed by valour, by the Will to Power.' ' 
And it was of England that he spoke. 

V 

The prophecy of Niebuhr eighty years ago, the 
fall of Britain which Stein in his dying years 
augured, is thus for these critics nearer fulfilment. 
The mode of the fulfilment is uncertain. 

The question of questions to young Germans, 
eager with historical analogies, exuberant with 
life, is: Who is to be the inheritor of this mori- 
bund, or quasi-moribund, empire? This Venice- 
Carthage of the twentieth century — who is to 
destroy her? 

No one who has studied Russian political history, 
Russian art and literature, the evolution of Russian 
ideas, no one who has witnessed the pathetic 
uncouth attempts of the Duma, can possibly see in 
Russia a world-leader. That part France has 
played, and cultured Germans join with Nietzsche 
in their tribute to the past services of France to 
humanity. She gave her name to the Crusaders; 
in the sixteenth century she brought Italy to 
Europe; in the eighteenth she was a legislator in 



A 



WHO SHALL LEAD THE WORLD ? 37 



thought. Napoleon in 1809 attempted to wrench 
a planet from the hideous tentacles of this octopus, 
this British dominion strangling a world. Napo- 
leon failed to achieve this deliverance of the planet 
from what Heine called the dullest, most insuffer- 
able, commonplace and bourgeois of all empires. 
Shall Germany succeed in that task of world- 
liberation? 

To the students of Sybel, who, awed and solemn, 
saw in 1870 the manifest finger of God; to the stu- 
dents of Giesebrecht, who saw in Germany the 
nation of nations, God's chosen for the accomplish- 
ment of His inscrutable will, the answer is obvious ; 
and when from the writings of Giesebrecht they 
turn to Treitschke, and from Treitschke to Droy- 
sen and Hausser, the old crude idea of a day of 
reckoning with England acquires a new signifi- 
cance. Germany is watching and waiting. Year 
by year silently she prepares. She recalls the 
alternate elations and trembling counsels in Rome 
before the march of Alaric in the fifth century; 
and with warrior-laughter she measures the cer- 
tainty of her triumph by the convulsive panic- 
attacks of her ignoble foe! After all, on this earth 
the one thing that is insufferable, whether in 
politics or in religion, whether in private or in 
national affairs, is that a sham should go on pre- 
tending to be a reality, that weakness should 
persist in grimacing as power, falsehood as truth, 
injustice as justice. That is the hypocrisy of the 



38 



THE PROBLEM 



soul. Hateful to God and to the enemies of God 
is such continuance — "A Dio spiacenti ed a' 
nemici sui!" 

And when from the present and the nearer past 
Germans turn to the remoter past and to the dis- 
tant periods of their history and inquire: "What 
are our title-deeds to world-empire?" a series of 
heroic and tragic forms meets their wondering 
eyes. For Englishmen, indifferent to or careless 
of their own history and blankly ignorant of Ger- 
many's, it is difficult to realize the effect upon the 
German mind of the discovery of the imperial eras 
of her history — the recovery of Charlemagne as a 
German hero, the exhumation from chronicle and 
annals of the forms of the Ottonides, and, above 
all, of the Hohenstaufen in the coloured and 
entrancing pages of Giesebrecht. There is no 
resisting the impressive grandeur of these figures, 
and the young German does not exist who can look 
back on that history without emotion and swelling 
pride. 1 

The Prussian School of historians has written the 
history of German}' as the exposition of a single 
divine idea — the movement towards unity under 
Prussia, and the creation, not of a new empire, but 

1 No one has felt more intimately than Wilhelm II. the glamour 
of those eras. Personally, and in his own temper, he has re- 
sponded to its literary expression — the heroic elan of Wolfram, 
the naive charm of Walther, Gottfried's wayward imaginings, 
the forest-romance of Iivetn. Yet he is no mere " Cultur-Konig," 
no Ludwig of Bavaria. 



"WORLD-DOMINION OR RUIN " 39 



of a new phase of empire. To them avatar suc- 
ceeds avatar. The Karlings represent the triumph 
over Rome. Charlemagne ends the work begun on 
the obscure and bloody fields of Campi Raudii and 
guided to a more glorious issue by Alaric and 
Ataulf, by Genseric and Theodoric. The Saxons 
submit to the Rome-idea, to Galilee; but with 
the Hohenstaufen German genius in religion, in 
politics, in law, in poetry, asserts itself. An 
immense pause follows, ending in the obscurantist 
Habsburgs; but through all the nation's life 
advances. 

And now, under the Hohenzollern, what is the 
future? Bernhardi, at least, is explicit: "For us 
there are two alternatives and no third — world- 
dominion or ruin, Weltmacht oder Niedergang." It 
is the interpretation of Treitschke's maxim, 
"Selbst ist der Mann." 

VI 

When, turning to England, I consider the apathy 
or the stolid indifference of the nation — when, for 
instance, I consider the deliberate and hostile 
silence or loud calumnies which, for the past seven 
years, have accompanied Lord Roberts's crusade; 
and w^hen, over against this apathy, I survey in 
this month of February, 19 13, the energy, the 
single, devoted purposefulness throbbing every- 
where throughout Germany, her forward-ranging 



4 o THE PROBLEM 

effort, her inner life, her army, her fleet, I seem to 
hear again the thunder of the footsteps of a great 
host. ... It is the war-bands of Alaric ! 

And pondering the future, seeking in the past, 
where alone it can be found, some taper-light to 
illumine the future, there rises before me one of the 
most solemn moments that I have ever personally 
experienced in English history. It was in 1900, in 
the early stages of the Boer War. But a few weeks 
ago, and the Scythian's taunt to the Roman Caesar 
seemed borne to us down the centuries, "I marvel 
that you still speak of empire, you who can no 
longer make war upon a village!" Now the crisis 
was over. 

On that afternoon we had before us in the Albert 
Hall a great statesman, the late Marquis of Salis- 
bury. What had been in his mind during the 
fateful weeks? And as he rose and the immense 
hush swept over the audience it was difficult not to 
recall Milton's verses, born perhaps of his own 
recollection of some chance visit to the House when 
Strafford rose or Pym, or from later memories of 
Cromwell himself : 

with grave 
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seem'd 
A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven 
Deliberation sat and publick care; 
And princely counsel in his face yet shone 
Majestick, though in ruin; sage he stood 



LORD SALISBURY 



4i 



With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 

The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 

Drew audience and attention still as night 

Or summer's noontide air, while thus he spake." 

In Lord Salisbury, at once in his personality and 
in his genius, I saw then, as I see now, the greatest 
statesman in English history since the eighteenth 
century, the last great Englishman of the line of 
Strafford, Somers, Bolingbroke, Carteret, Chat- 
ham and Canning. Certainly in no politician in 
English history have we the proofs of a profounder 
insight. In this very matter of Germany, for 
instance, he foresaw, point by point, her develop- 
ment; and at the beginning of his career, in one 
brilliant article after another in our quarterlies, 
Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, marked 
out the exact lines which that development of 
Germany took — from the Kiel Canal right on to 
those batteries and " Dreadnoughts'' concentrated 
there in the North Sea, w r hich are already, whether 
w 7 e regard them as such or not, the first conflict 
between England and Germany. 1 

And in delivering one of the last and, I think, one 
of the greatest of his speeches, Lord Salisbury must 

1 And in that conflict England has suffered her first defeat, her 
first moral defeat. She has had to withdraw her fleet from the 
Mediterranean. That sea was once ours — an English lake. It is 
no longer ours. Our power is concentrated, watching our dearest 
friends, those Germans who have no intention whatever of coming 
near England! 



42 



THE PROBLEM 



have felt the futility of his insight. He might, if 
Greek tragedy had been as familiar to him as the 
laws of metals, have cited the verses of Teiresias: 

<3>£u <I>£u, $poveIv Setvbv evGa [xy] tsXy) 

The thought must have been in his mind. Yet he 
was to the last a fighter, an Englishman who never 
doubted his country's ultimate victory, temperate, 
a master of the under-statement, a man whom, 
upon the whole, it is a greater achievement for a 
nation to have produced than to have produced 
a Bismarck. 2 

And the words which Lord Salisbury spoke that 
day? If ever a great warning was given to a 
people it was contained in those words, in his ref- 
erence to dying empires and dying nations, to the 
passing of kingdoms, the vicissitudes of States and 

1 "Alas, how dreadful to have wisdom where it profits not the 
wise!" 

2 1 do not find less vividness, more wordiness in his speeches" 
than in those of Bismarck. Eulogizers of an academic bias, 
indeed, assert that Bismarck's speeches will endure whilst Ger- 
many endures. He has enriched, they say, the German language 
with innumerable phrases ; but when challenged they are slow to 
produce those phrases. They begin and nearly always end with 
"blood and iron." I make no such claims for Lord Salisbury. 
He was not an artist, nor was Bismarck; but he was superior to 
the latter as a thinker. Had he been a German he would not 
have incurred the just and savage contempt which Otto Weininger 
and Nietzsche have poured on Bismarck. 



A 



DEMOSTHENE'S TO ATHENS 



the mutation in things; and, above all, in his appeal 
to Englishmen to arm and prepare themselves for 
war, for a war which might be on them at any hour, 
and a war for their very existence as a nation and 
as a race. And he quoted with deep meaning and 
deep purpose — for as an orator Lord Salisbury 
seldom strayed into the past of history without 
meaning to the utmost every word he said — he 
quoted the downfall of Carthage. 1 

As I walked from the meeting, the twilight fall- 
ing across the Park, the words of another orator 
came back to me — the exhortation addressed by 
Demosthenes to Athens, words which, spoken in 
Athens' darkest hour, bear a strange resemblance to 
those spoken by Lord Salisbury in this, the last of 
his great speeches. "Yet, O Athenians, " said the 
Greek, "yet is there time! And there is one 
manner in which you can recover your greatness, 
or, dying, fall worthy of your past at Marathon 
and Salamis. Yet, Athenians, you have it in 
your power; and the manner of it is this. Cease to 

1 Underlying the discussions in this country as to Germany's 
motives for war with England there is often the assumption that 
it is not England that Germany desires, but England's colonies. 
Yet has England the power to surrender the colonies? Or if she 
surrendered them, Canada or New Zealand, for instance, would 
they yield at England's bidding? And in attempting to enter 
into possession of Canada, Germany would at once find herself at 
war with the United States. But it is not our colonies that Ger- 
many desires. It is a great central European State, with these 
islands as its conquered provinces — that is the true meaning of 
Lord Salisbury's last solemn warnings from the fate of Carthage. 



44 



THE PROBLEM 



hire your armies. Go yourselves, every man of 
you, and stand in the ranks; and either a victory 
beyond all victories in its glory awaits you, or, 
falling, you shall fall greatly and worthy of your 
past!" 

The roles of Demosthenes in Athens and of Cato 
or Tacitus in Rome are significant. These men are 
phenomena in an onward-rushing stream. But 
Athens listened to Demosthenes as she might have 
listened to the protagonist in one of the tragedies. 
Yet this was her own tragedy. Would England be 
wiser than Athens? 

Twelve years have passed. The voice which that 
afternoon thrilled an immense audience is still. 
Edward VII has succeeded, and, after a brief 
dominion, has followed the Empress-Queen to the 
vaults at Windsor. It was 1900; it is 19 13; and to 
the words of the last great Englishman in politics 
there have been added the message and solemn 
warning of perhaps the greatest living leader of 
men in the field of battle, the man who more than 
any other merits the name "the Sidney of these 
later times" — Lord Roberts. How much more 
insistent at this hour, how much more imperious, 
challenging to every Englishman who cares for 
more than the day's transient interests, have 
become the words of the Greek orator, which find 
this strange echo, after more than two thousand 
years, in the summons of these great Englishmen: 
" Rouse yourselves from your lethargy! Cease to 



LORD ROBERTS'S MESSAGE 



hire your soldiers! Arm and stand in the ranks 
yourselves — as Englishmen should! And thus, 
dying you shall die greatly, or, victorious, yours 
shall be such a victory as nothing in England's 
past can exceed or rival. " 



LECTURE II 



PEACE AND WAR 
I 

The theme of our last lecture was the confronta- 
tion of two great nations, each endowed from the 
past with the memories of ancient valour, of hero- 
ism in art and poetry as in war and politics; each, 
again, possessing that attribute which I can only 
describe as innate capacity or genius for empire. 
Yet the one has been for two hundred years the 
possessor of the richest as well as the most in- 
teresting portions of this earth, whilst the other is 
shut within its boundaries, the Baltic, the Danube, 
and the Rhine. England is a nation schooled in 
empire from the past, the power which once 
belonged to the few gradually passing more and 
more into the ranks of the English race itself, so 
that you have for the first time in history at 
once a nation and a democracy that is imperial. 1 

1 This is the unique character of Britain as an empire. Athens 
was an example of this, but Athens was a civic empire, not a 
national empire in the sense in which England is a nation. More- 
over, whilst it was in form a republic and democratic, it was in 
its essence aristocratic and oligarchic, the large majority of the 
population having no share, direct or indirect, in government. 

4 6 



ENGLAND AND GERMANY CONFRONTED 47 



In contrast to this, Germany is a nation which is 
undisciplined in empire, which has never yet 
known its glory. The position of Wilhelm II is 
that of an emperor without an empire. 

And the question we had to consider, quite 
abstractly, was: What, according to the philosophy 
of history, or even according to the mere processes 
of common sense, is likely to result from such a 
confrontation? Above all, what is likely to result 
when the first nation, though pursuing colossal 
organic ideals, yet seems to have become almost 
weary of the glory of empire, expressing frequently 
the desire for arbitration, for the limitation of 
armaments, a " naval holiday, " peace at any 
price; 1 when its war-spirit, its energy, its sense of 

The nearest approach to Athens is not England, but the Venice of 
the middle period, the Venice of the great Serrata del Consiglio, 
where the whole mass of the inhabitants were excluded from 
political power, unless those descended from or connected with 
the governing authorities of the time. 

1 Within the last few days, for instance, at a mere suggestion 
by Admiral Tirpitz as to the diminution of the German Navy, the 
whole Liberal Press rushed forward like gudgeons to welcome 
even the shadow of a pretence of peace. Yet what really underlay 
this suggestion was the desire of the German government to have 
the more power to put forward their unprecedented demand for 
fifty-two millions to increase the German Army. But, indeed, to 
no student of German history, above all to no student of Hohen- 
zollern history, does this give the slightest surprise. Such 
Machiavellism in politics has been the mark of Prussian history 
from the moment that Prussia appeared as a first-rate Power in 
Europe under the Great Elector, when it led to Prussia's first 
great victory at Fehrbellin. What was the policy of Frederick I 



4 8 



PEACE AND WAR 



heroism are apparently diminishing, and the mere 
craving for life and its comforts seems to be con- 
quering every other passion — as if to this nation 
the aim of all life were the avoidance of suffering — 
what, I say, is likely to result, if, confronting this, 
you have a nation high in its courage, lofty in its 
ambitions, containing within itself apparently 
inexhaustible forces, moving on its own path, 
which in the future may lead it to destinies to 
which even the imagination of a Treitschke can 
hardly assign a limit ? 

In to-day's lecture we have a somewhat different 
problem to face, but one that is intimately and 
organically connected with the subject of the last 
lecture. It is the problem indicated by such 
phrases as "universal peace, " "the end of war," 
"all our swords turned to reaping-hooks, all our 
barracks turned to granaries, " and the like, the 
problem raised by those who would wish those 
energies which now find their scope in battle to be 
diverted to ends which have as their object that 
great aim in life — the avoidance of suffering and 

and of Frederick the Great himself but just this ? "He is a 
fool, " said Frederick the Great, "and that nation is a fool, who, 
having the power to strike his enemy unawares, does not strike 
and strike his deadliest." Even Frederick William III, empty 
and vain as he was, a man whom Napoleon derided as "a tailor 
amongst kings," used this same policy in 1 813 against Napoleon 
— and the Battle of the Nations was the result. And in the nine- 
teenth century the same policy has guided the Emperor William I 
and the present Kaiser. 



THE CRY FOR PACIFICISM 49 

the multiplication of comforts; in a word, the 
problem of Pacificism and the theories of the 
Pacificists and their comparative influence on 
England and on Germany. 

The theory of Pacificism is a growing force in 
English thought and English literature, and is, in 
English politics, apparently becoming a principle 
of a great and historical party — one of its ideals, at 
least. We have in practical politics witnessed its 
operation during the last decade in the noisy if 
transient enthusiasm, not necessarily insincere, 
with which the successive Conferences at The 
Hague have been garlanded ; or again in the recep- 
tion of President Taft's "Message"; or again in 
the appeals to arbitration, and the various pro- 
posals for the limitation of armaments, serious or 
grotesque, to which I have referred. 

In this effusive sentiment for peace, these spas- 
modic efforts to stop what it names "the mad race 
for armaments, " has England, this Power which 
possesses one-fifth of the globe and an army at 
least as large as that of Switzerland, forgotten its 
sense of humour? Do we imagine that the other 
Powers of the Continent see England exactly as 
England sees itself — England ! the successful burg- 
lar who, an immense fortune amassed, has retired 
from business, and having broken every law, 
human and divine, violated every instinct of 
honour and fidelity on every sea and on every 
continent, desires now the protection of the police ! 



PEACE AND WAR 



"If you are not a coward, " says a character in 
one of the Sagas, " stand still whilst I send you this 
gift" — the hurling of a spear! Similarly Germany 
retorts when England, under her hypocritical or 
anxious dread, proposes to disarm — "You are the 
great robber-State; yet now in the twentieth 
century, as if the war for the world were over 
because you are glutted with booty, now it is you, 
you who preach to us Germans universal peace, 
arbitration, and the diminution of armaments! 
But our position is that this war is not over." 
And they exhibit England's overtures to Germany 
as due to subtlety or cowardice. 

That is the significance of Germany's reply to 
the offer of the British government in 1907 to 
reduce her programme from three 14 Dreadnoughts" 
to two. Her answer was to increase her estimates 
and accelerate her programme. That is the sig- 
nificance of her answer in 1908, when England laid 
down only two 44 Dreadnoughts" and Germany 
retorted by laying down four. That, above all, is 
the significance of Germany's action in 191 1, when, 
amid all the froth and loathsome sentiment and 
empty vapouring around President Taft's 44 Mes- 
sage" — when it seemed as if humanity, in politics, 
at least, had forgotten its own semblance — 
suddenly a man's voice, human at last, announced 
itself in the courage and common-sense of Beth- 
mann-Hollweg's utterance (March, 191 1), 44 The 
vital strength of a nation is the only measure of 



GERMANY'S ANSWER 



5i 



that nation's armaments." And that, in 1913, 
is still the significance of Germany's answer to 
the egregious proposal of " a naval holiday " : a war 
levy of £52,000,000 to be expended on fortresses, 
aircraft, and barracks; the peace strength of the 
army to be raised from six hundred thousand to 
between eight and nine hundred thousand men. 

Germany will never sincerely cease arming. If 
England builds on the dream of Germany acqui- 
escent she is destined to a bloody and terrible 
awakening. Bethmann-Hollweg, in 191 1, but 
repeats the truth enunciated by Treitschke in 
1890, that a nation's armed force is the expression 
of a nation's will to power, of a nation's will to life, 
and must advance with that life. We can under- 
stand the elation of Bernhardi, his pride in his 
country and its great past, his belief in its yet 
greater future as the nation of nations, dowered 
with the right to set itself the high task of guiding 
the future of humanity. 

A year ago, in speaking of the French Revolu- 
tion, I defined the essence of that movement as 
the strife from a high to an ever higher reality. 
Amongst the Powers and States of the Continent 
and of the world that seems Germany's part at the 
present hour. 

And here let me say with regard to Germany 
that of all England's enemies she is by far the 
greatest; and by " greatness" I mean not merely 
magnitude, not her millions of soldiers, her millions 



52 



PEACE AND WAR 



of inhabitants, I mean grandeur of soul. She is the 
greatest and most heroic enemy — if she is our 
enemy — that England, in the thousand years of 
her history, has ever confronted. In the sixteenth 
century we made war upon Spain and the empire 
of Spain. But Germany in the twentieth century 
is a greater power, greater in conception, in thought, 
in all that makes for human dignity, than was the 
Spain of Charles V and Philip II. In the seven- 
teenth century we fought against Holland; but 
the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser is greater 
than the Holland of De Witt. In the eighteenth 
century we fought against France; and again, the 
Germany of to-day is a higher, more august power 
than France under Louis XIV. 

II 

What, then, is Pacificism? Dismissing from our 
minds for a moment German criticism or German 
interpretation of England's purposes, let us con- 
sider the ideal itself and its exponents. 

The ideal in itself is so fair, this vision of a de- 
sirable life, that we are silent even before the 
eccentricities or fatuities of its advocates. Man, 
in his war against the vast sorrow of existence and 
necessary pain, declares: Now we shall at least 
cease to torture each other; man shall no longer 
add deliberately to the sufferings of man, more 
tiger than the tiger. This earth then shall afford 



PACIFICISM 



53 



the picture which allured the imagination of Mil- 
ton and of Shelley, nation side by side with nation, 
race beside race, arranged in variegated communi- 
ties and States — monarchies, empires, democracies, 
republics— sedulous in a many-coloured harmoni- 
ous activity. The very memory of war and of 
war-heroisms — Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander, Achil- 
les — falls into the dim background of an ever 
remoter past from which humanity has liberated 
itself, dedicated, not to war, but to the emulous 
rivalries of peace, to the creation of beauty, to the 
perfecting of the mind, to the discovery of fresh 
modes of access to human nobility and to human 
joy — music, painting, sculpture, poetry, architec- 
ture; dedicated to the concentration in peace and 
leisure of man's faculties upon the extension of 
knowledge, the conquest of the eras of the past 
and of the eras of the future as it bursts through 
the present and its veils like the sun through fogs, 
the ever wider expansion of our scrutiny into the 
interstellar spaces, thought and imagination fusing 
themselves, above all, in some newer vision of the 
universe and of God which shall as far transcend 
the old philosophies and the old religions as the 
theories of modern astronomy transcend those of 
Hipparchus or Tycho Brahe. 

Before such an ideal we are disposed, I say, to be 
tolerant even to the extravagances of Tolstoi, his 
appeals to the Gospels, for instance — though a 
dissertation upon Christ as a strategist might have 



54 



PEACE AND WAR 



been written by a medievalist, if strategy had been 
an art then — and to listen without smiling when 
the great Spanish legist Alberdi declares that the 
soldier is no higher than the executioner, though 
one would have imagined that the difference be- 
tween the hangman on the scaffold, pinioning his 
victim before destroying him, and the warrior on 
the battlefield, perilling his life, would have been 
apparent even to a Spanish doctrinaire! 

It is difficult to answer the contentions of Pa- 
cificism just as it is difficult to answer all modern 
isms, because every ism has certain groups within 
it, and every group offers its own interpretation. 
To the group represented by Count Lyof Tolstoi, 
for instance, war is condemnable because it is 
contrary to the very spirit — as he understands 
them — of the four Gospels and of religion itself. 
Did not Christ come to the earth to proclaim 
peace? Eighteen hundred years have rolled away 
and there is nothing but war. To this there is the 
retort that, though Christ does not disdain to use 
a metaphor from the life of camps, yet He accom- 
panies it by no anathema on war. And the peace 
which Christ came to proclaim was not the peace 
of the ending of battles; it was the peace within 
the soul, the spirit at one with itself, Islam, in the 
sense that Mohammed used it, a metaphysical 
peace altogether apart from political peace. 

Then, again, another group represents war as 
wholly evil because it is contrary to Law, asserting 



THE SENTIMENTAL CRUSADE 



that when two nations go to war it is as if two 
litigants in a Court of Law were to maintain 
each his own cause by violence. This is the posi- 
tion taken up by the followers of Alberdi. Yet 
the litigant appeals to something higher than 
himself, while no free State sees anything higher 
than itself. 

Again, there is a whole crowd, to whom I need 
not refer individually, of lesser names, publicists, 
journalists, novelists and mere cranks, to whom 
this phantasm appears the one thing worthy to 
concern men in any serious manner — all of them 
having the peculiar characteristic that they 
approach the plain man, the man in the street, 
with a slightly truculent air: "Now, why don't 
you help us to bring about this good of ours?" 
And there is nothing for the plain man to answer 
unless this: "The thing you are trying to bring 
about does not exist — it is simply a nothing. If, as 
Bismarck did at the Congress of Berlin, you at- 
tempt to bring about peace between any two 
individual nations, that, of course, is a matter 
within the scope of common sense ; but this other — 
this 1 universal peace' — what is it?" And then 
they can only reiterate their belief in the passing 
away of war, when all our swords shall be turned to 
reaping-hooks, our barracks into granaries, and, I 
suppose, all our howitzers into fire-irons ! 

But what can be said in answer to the pacificists' 
minute descriptions of the horrors of war? To 



56 



PEACE AND WAR 



throw wide the field-hospitals and exhibit doctors 
and dressers at work on the wounded; to point to 
the dead and dying hurried into the trenches; to 
assert, "This is war; this is reality, " is as convinc- 
ing and as reasonable as to point to a regiment on 
parade with band playing and colours flying and to 
say: "This is the reality. " War will never be 
abolished by such denunciation of isolated fea- 
tures. For in war there is always a series of in- 
tricate and, complex phenomena, extending from 
the period of apparent peace to the inception of 
the idea of conflict, on through the corresponding 
changes in the mind and purposes of the govern- 
ment and nation to the conflict itself, the battle- 
field, the sequel, the terms. 

There in its specious and glittering beauty the 
ideal of Pacificism remains ; yet in the long march 
of humanity across thousands of years or thou- 
sands of centuries it remains still an ideal, lost in 
inaccessible distances, as when first it gleamed 
across the imagination. It has always been there. 
We find its traces in the Iliad and in the Sagas, 
in the verse of Pindar and in the profound and 
reflective prose of Thucydides. Livy's imagina- 
tion responded to it, even when with the brush of 
a Veronese or of a Titian he painted the wars of 
Rome. It informs some of the noblest passages 
of the Annals of Tacitus. It appears as the 
"Truce of God" in the Middle Age, and in the 
orators of the Reformation pronounces a maledic- 



ASPECTS OF PACIFICISM 57 



tion upon him who wages war unjustly. In the 
seventeenth century it is proclaimed as an ideal in 
the name of Religion, in the eighteenth in the 
name of Humanity, and in the nineteenth in the 
name of commerce, industrialism and the progress 
of the working classes. 

It is not, perhaps, until the eighteenth century 
that this idea of universal peace displays its present 
characteristics. At the period of the Marlborough 
wars there appears in France a portentous folio 
volume by the Abbe de St. Pierre, having for its 
central thesis the evils of war in the abstract. The 
position there taken up is not very different from 
the position taken up by Tolstoi. War is stigma- 
tized as being in itself hostile to religion, and is 
denounced as being contrary to the commands of 
Christ. This book produced a great many works 
of a similar kind, and many refutations. 

In the course of the nineteenth century you find 
this idea appearing here in England in a new phase, 
above all in the 14 Manchester School. M War is 
now regarded and described not so much as hostile 
to religion, not so much as hostile to the commands 
of Christ, but as inimical to the interests of indus- 
try, The peace of the world must be secured, 
indeed ; but it is to be secured not by religion but 
by a great conspiracy — or co-operation, if you like 
— of all the forces of industry throughout Europe. 
That is the Manchester doctrine of universal 
peace — highly characteristic, one would say, of the 



58 



PEACE AND WAR 



nineteenth century! Yet it had a distinct power 
at once in France and in Germany. 

The final form that this strange theory has 
assumed is that which it now affects to wear in 
the twentieth century, a form equally interesting. 
Now war is declaimed against and universal peace 
with all its beauties is proclaimed, not because war 
is contrary to the laws of God, to the laws of 
religion, but— because it is opposed to social well- 
being, and, economically, is profitless alike to vic- 
tor and to vanquished. It has ceased to pay, 
and it has ceased, therefore, to add to the comfort 
of nations ! 

Yet despite this hubbub of talk down all the 
centuries war has continued — absolutely as if not a 
word had been said either on one side or the other. 
Man's dreadful toll in blood has not yet all been 
paid. The human race bears still this burden. 
Declaimed against in the name of religion, in the 
name of humanity, in the name of profit-and-loss, 
war still goes on, and to this day it is there — there 
in the Balkans, raging at this hour! 

Ill 

Why, then, is universal peace still an ideal? Why 
is it less like some hope of the future, gilding the 
eastern horizon, than like some memory of a 
Saturnian age sunk far below the darkened hori- 
zons of the past? 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 



59 



An enumeration of the evils that attend man's 
life in time of peace is obviously no answer. It is 
equally no answer to celebrate the opportunities to 
good-fellowship and self-sacrifice which the battle- 
field affords, and sometimes witnesses. Towards 
other ideals man has progressed— in his war against 
disease, for instance, and in his war against nature, 
the forest, the sea, the vicissitudes of season and of 
climate; towards this ideal alone he has made no 
progress. And yet it is an ideal which, unlike per- 
ennial youth or immunity from pain and disease, 
appears to be within his power. 

War has changed its forms. Tribal forays have 
ceased, and the internecine hatred of clans; but the 
tribes and clans have themselves been merged in 
the higher unity of the nation or the race, and the 
warfares of the clan and the tribe have seemed to 
add all their complexity and ferocity to the wars 
of nations. That peculiar form of heroic warfare 
of the Sagas has disappeared; but the conditions 
of life which made it possible or necessary no 
longer exist. Wars between city and city, as those 
between Genoa and Pisa, Athens and Sparta, have 
also ceased ; but civic States have vanished. Again, 
the wars of religion have ceased; but religion is no 
longer the dominant force in man's life. War re- 
mains as the supreme act of the State, unchanged 
in essence, though varying in mode. In Europe, 
which really governs the planet, every advance in 
politics or religion has been attended by war. 



6o 



PEACE AND WAR 



Now if one turns for a moment from the ideal of 
universal peace- — whether one regards it as a mere 
chimera or as coming within the sphere of practical 
politics — to the ideal of war, its history is certainly 
illuminating. 

To the great historians of Greece, to Thucydides, 
for instance, the stern disciplinarian of humanity, 
pfatoq StSdaxaXoq, the most grave, the most tragic 
and the most philosophic of all historians, war 
represents a permanent factor in human life, and 
not only a permanent factor, but a noble factor. 
It is the school of heroism, the exercise-ground of 
nations, disciplining them in the highest manhood 
— in valour. And this attitude of the Greek his- 
torian governs equally the later Greek writers, 
such as Polybius, who come within the dominion 
of Rome. For war is at the root of Roman history. 
The Romans are the great inventors in the art of 
war ; they are the first scientists in war ; and to the 
Romans it was not a mortal man but a god that 
invented the formation of the Roman legion. 

This attitude of Rome persists down to the 
Middle Age — though then, in the Middle Age, war 
receives the added glamour of religion. To 
Mohammed and to his Arabs in the East war is not 
only in itself a heroism, it is the divine act. And 
in the West, similarly, in the same period, you find 
the Roman Papacy adopting as the very central 
thought of its foreign policy a great religious war — 
the war of the Crusades. And if at that time you 



JUST AND UNJUST WARS 61 



do find arising in Europe the notion of the " Truce 
of God," this Truce of God becomes simply the 
institution of a temporary peace between the 
feudal chiefs and barons; it is no repudiation of 
war in itself. 

The same point of view is maintained right on 
to the Renaissance and Reformation period. To 
such a thinker and writer as Machiavelli, perhaps 
the most profound mind that Italy ever produced, 
far wider in its range of knowledge and speculation 
than Dante's, war is the school of virttt, of valour, 
heroism, excellence of any kind. With the Refor- 
mation, on the other hand, a more psychological 
investigation of war sets in. By the very spirit 
of the Reformation the Divine was declared to be 
here upon the earth, within man's reach and life, 
and in all human actions — man's life on earth 
being now not simply regarded as evil. War 
therefore had to receive a closer examination and 
an attempt had to be made to harmonize it with 
what seemed to be the Divine. It is then that the 
distinction arises between just and unjust wars. 
A great cause, a good cause, it was said, justifies 
war in the abstract; but he who wages "an unjust 
war," in the phrase of Grotius, endures all the 
responsibility for all the vile actions, all the suffer- 
ing, appertaining to that war. 

Frederick the Great, he who above all men exem- 
plified heroism in war in the creation of that 
War-State of Prussia which has gradually grown 



62 



PEACE AND WAR 



into the German Empire of the present hour, 
writes in extreme age to Voltaire a letter which may 
be taken as the summing-up of this tedious debate: 
"I am old, cheerful, gouty, good-humoured. Now 
that Poland has been settled by a little ink and a 
pen, the ' Encyclopedic 9 cannot declaim against 
mercenary brigands. For the future I cannot 
vouch. Running over the pages of history, I see 
that ten years never pass without a war. This 
intermittent fever may have moments of respite, 
but cease, never !" This is the last word of the 
eighteenth century upon the dream of universal 
peace, a word spoken by one of the greatest kings 
of any age. 

Here, then, we are brought up sharply against 
the question: "Is man's failure to realize the ideal 
of universal peace an arraignment of his capacity 
or his sincerity? Has he the power to realize it or 
is it the will that is lacking ?" Without attempt- 
ing further analysis and discussion, I am obliged 
to answer that a survey of world-history — India, 
Babylon, Persia, China, Hellas, Rome, the Middle 
Age and Modern Europe — enforces the conclusion 
that hitherto man has lacked not only the power 
but the will to end war and to establish peace 
throughout the continents of the habitable globe. 

IV 

Now it is a question surely worth considering: 
Why is it and for what reward that man still 



GLORY 



63 



clings to war? Is there anything in war that is 
not wholly evil? Or must we be accused of per- 
petual self-contradiction and blindness to our own 
interests, all down the long six thousand years of 
history? Or, on the other hand, is there in war 
something which has escaped the examination of 
Pacificism, and on what ground can one maintain 
that this is so? 

First of all, let me remind you that in human 
life as a whole there are always elements and 
forces, there are always motives and ideals, which 
defy the analysis of reason — mysterious and dark 
forces. Man shall not live by bread alone! And 
in war this element constantly tends to assert 
itself. It assumes forms that sometimes are 
dazzling in their beauty; sometimes are wrapt in 
a kind of transcendental wonder; sometimes, in 
appearance at least, are simply utilitarian, or 
chimerical, or fantastic. But all alike have this 
quality of defying reason, of eluding the grasp 
of the mind when exercised in formal judgment 
merely. It is easy, for example, to demonstrate 
that the glory of battle is an illusion; but by the 
same argument you can demonstrate that all 
glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. 
Nevertheless men still live and go on pursuing that 
illusion and that mockery. 

As an illustration of what I mean by that which 
stands above reason, let me speak to you for a 
moment of that incident in the Antarctic zone 



6 4 



PEACE AND WAR 



which but a few weeks ago was absorbing the 
imagination of every man and woman in these 
islands. Let me speak to you of Captain Scott 
and his heroic band, and let us consider how far 
this element that transcends reason entered into 
that particular heroism. 

Image to yourselves that vast, that shapeless 
desolation that reigns there for ever around the 
austral pole, league on frost-bound league, Death's 
appanage, untainted by any life eternally, not a 
motion except the wild rage of the tempest or the 
silent fall of ice-flakes through the windless air — a 
desolation peopled by such phantoms as daunted 
even the imagination of Camoens, the poet of 
Vasco da Gama, the first great adventurer into 
those silent seas. There, during the past year, 
month by month the Polar sun forlorn has gleamed 
through the mists, month by month through the 
long night the Southern Cross has hung her 
glittering fires on the steep blackness of the Antarc- 
tic sky, looking down upon some little heaps of 
English dust. Why have they come hither — these 
Englishmen? What is the madness that has 
drawn them from their secure homes in Devon- 
shire or Suffolk, Ireland or the Welsh border, to 
die thus agonizing here? That is the question 
which, by not too daring a metaphor, the Southern 
Cross might ask as through that long night she 
looks down upon the English dead extended there 
in frozen rigidity unmoving. To what possible 



THE DEATH OF HEROES 



65 



end have they come there? Assuredly for no mere 
utilitarian end. The lure that has led them to 
their glory and their rest is Reason indeed, the 
increase of Knowledge, but something higher also. 
Mere love of formal Knowledge — questions as to 
the precise position of the South Pole, or whether 
the fossils of an extinct race of animals which once 
wandered there are preserved in the rocks and 
stones— would never have inspired that drama. 

For put before yourselves, incident by incident, 
the later stages of that heroism — first the careful 
survey on the Pole itself, hour by priceless hour 
a hostage to death, then the terrible return with 
the sick comrade, his death, and then that strange 
heroism on the part of Captain Oates. As a his- 
torian or at least a student of history, let me dwell 
for a moment on the distinction of this valour. In 
the Icelandic Sagas of the Middle Age, which re- 
flect in a very remarkable manner the English char- 
acter of that time although they were not written 
by Englishmen, you find a certain kind of courage 
frequently delineated — the courage shown, say, 
in the great fight to avenge the death of Kjartan, 
where one man after another, when they have 
surrounded the house where the enemy is en- 
trenched, volunteers to be the first to attack the 
house and meet death. But in the death of 
Captain Oates a valour of quite a different kind 
displays itself. In that courage you have some- 
thing spiritual, mysterious, added to this other 



66 



PEACE AND WAR 



courage of the Sagas — something which leads that 
English gentleman to set forth solitary into the 
terror-haunted darkness, seeking no visible enemy, 
seeking only the universal enemy, to him a friend — 
death, death ; stumbling blindly, yet onwards and 
still onw^ards into the night, into Annihilation, 
fronting it ... . 

And then pass to the last stage in the drama — to 
that other death. There in the tent beside his 
dead the leader sits, still alive; there he sits, un- 
vanquished and unappalled, his head propped 
against the tent-pole to ease his fatigue in the last 
slow dreadful vigil, whilst down over his magnifi- 
cently English features a night deeper than the 
Polar night descends. And what are the thoughts 
which then flicker in front of him? We know 
them; we have them written in his own hand in 
that priceless record — priceless because authentic. 
"The greatness of England — my nation !" It is 
the greatness of England which uplifts him as 
death steals over his features like a marble mask. 

Here, surely, we have a kind of heroism which it 
would daunt the courage of any pacificist, of any 
doctrinaire, to explain by the profit and loss theory 
or to analyze by the ordinary processes of reason 
at all. 

Now I suggest to you that one explanation of 
this extraordinary paradox in human history — the 
persistence of war in spite of what seems its un- 
reason — is that there is something in war, after 



A 



NATIONAL WARS IN ENGLAND 67 



all, that is analogous to this heroism there in the 
Antarctic zone, something that transcends reason ; 
that in war and the right of war man has a pos- 
session which he values above religion, above 
industry and above social comforts; that in war 
man values the power which it affords to life of 
rising above life, the power which the spirit of 
man possesses to pursue the Ideal. In all life at 
its height, in thought, art, and action, there is a 
tendency to become transcendental; and if we 
examine the wars of England or of Germany in 
the past we find governing these wars throughout 
this higher power of heroism, or of something, at 
least, which transcends reason. 

Until about five hundred years ago England can 
hardly be said to have fought as a nation. Her 
wars till then represent rather the heroism of 
dynasties and of individual groups of men than the 
heroism of the nation as such. But towards the 
middle of the fourteenth century there began a 
series of really national wars in England — the wars 
against France, with their great battles of Crecy 
and Agincourt, and the great disaster, the hour 
when with Talbot at Castillon an empire sank. 
Then there is the war against Spain in the six- 
teenth century, and in the seventeenth the wars 
against Holland and the France of Louis XIV, 
which continue into the eighteenth century and 
find their natural termination only in the wars 
against Napoleon. In the nineteenth century 



68 



PEACE AND WAR 



there is a long series of wars in all parts of the world 
— in the Crimea, in India and Afghanistan, in 
China, in New Zealand, in Egypt, in Western and in 
Southern Africa ; so that it might be said without 
exaggeration that through all these years scarcely 
a sun set which did not look upon some English- 
man's face dead in battle — dead for England! 

Xow for what have these wars been fought? 
Can one detect underneath them any governing 
idea, controlling them from first to last? I answer 
at once: There is such an idea, and that idea is 
the idea of Empire. All England's wars for the 
past five hundred years have been fought for 
empire. There is first of all a war for an empire in 
France — a wholly unrealizable idea, a war bound 
to end in failure in the very nature of things, and 
yet a war to which the English nation gave itself 
with a splendour of courage, a lavishness at once 
of blood and treasure, that still fills the mind with 
admiration and lifts it beyond those utilitarian 
speculations to which I have referred. 

That war ends in disaster; and just at the 
moment when that disaster is most complete, 
when it seems as if England were doomed to fall 
to a secondary or even a tertiary place in world- 
history, suddenly there occurs that event which 
it is hard not to ascribe to some deeper cause than 
chance, to some profounder purpose than the 
hazard in things. It is the discovery of the means 
to a greater empire than the empire in France, to 



A 



THE IDEA OF EMPIRE 69 



an empire at once in the sunrise and in the sunset. 
It is America: it is India. The effect of this dis- 
covery is like the awakening of a sleeper. A new 
hope for Englishmen arises, and now the English 
imagination is fired and filled with this idea, so 
that throughout the whole of English life, in 
every phase and grade of it, there is that exaltation, 
that spiritual exultancy which finds its supreme 
expression in the Elizabethan drama, in the great 
dramatists of that time, in Marlowe and Shake- 
speare and Ford, in Webster, in Beaumont and 
Fletcher, in that outburst of thought and of art 
which has no parallel in world-history — not in 
Greece itself, unless possibly for a moment in the 
age of Pericles. 1 

This war for empire again finds expression in 
the conflict with Spain, in the wars against Holland 
and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries. And what was the stake for which 
England fought in all her battles against Bona- 
parte? The stake was world-empire ; and Napoleon 
knew it well. France's opportunity was now, or 
her world-empire was lost for ever. Bonaparte 
fought for that, and fought for it titanically and 
superbly; and dying there in Sainte-Helene there 
died with him a world-hope. 

1 Even there it is less rich and varied in poetry; although, on 
the other hand, the glory of the Parthenon, of sculpture, belongs 
to Greece alone. That is the inalienable and for ever precious 
gift of Hellas. 



70 



PEACE AND WAR 



Here then we have this transcendental force 
governing the wars of England. And if we turn 
from England to Germany we find the same ele- 
ment which transcends reason governing the wars 
of Germany. One emperor after another is led 
south across the Alps in the attempt to make 
Italy a part of Germany; to govern Italy, and 
therefore the Papacy, from the Rhine; to make a 
reality of that which was called the "Holy Roman 
Empire' 9 — an attempt doomed to disaster, just 
as England was doomed to disaster on the fields 
of France, a perfectly hopeless dream! Yet what 
heroism, what courage, what names! It is to 
those names and to that heroic past that Germans 
turn for inspiration as year by year this newer 
hope of empire arising within the German mind 
deepens. 

This dream of empire continues in her later wars. 

[Note. — This section was left unfinished. A survey 
of the wars of Germany in the light of this idea 
is evidently the line on which it would have been 
continued, but unfortunately the lecturer left 
no notes which could be used to finish the 
section^ 

V 

Now considering the wars of England and of 
Germany in this light, considering also the respec- 
tive positions of these two nations at the present 



i 



EFFECTS OF PACIFICISM 71 



day, what is likely to be the comparative effect on 
England and Germany of Pacificism with its de- 
nial of the part played by danger and by suffering 
in all heroic life? 

Upon a young and virile nation, a rising military 
State, daily growing in power, Pacificism can 
never exert much influence for evil; there is no 
possibility of such a nation being seriously turned 
from heroism. But to an old nation in which 
certain forces of decay seem, at least, already to 
be manifesting themselves, might not such a 
theory, if too ardently adopted, be fraught with 
very terrible danger, with very real and disastrous 
consequences? 

In regard to Germany we are confronted by 
certain circumstances that indisputably merit our 
consideration here in England. There is, for 
instance, the annual appearance in Germany of 
very nearly seven hundred books dealing with 
war as a science. This points, at once, to an 
extreme preoccupation in that nation with the 
idea of war. I doubt whether twenty books a 
year on the art of war appear in this country, 
and whether their circulation, when they do ap- 
pear, is much more than twenty ! 

There is, again, the German way of regarding 
war. What is the attitude of mind towards war 
of Treitschke, for example, a man whose spirit 
still controls German youth, German patriotism, 
a man who has a power in Germany, as a thinker 



72 



PEACE AND WAR 



and as a writer, that you might compare to the 
power exercised by Carlyle and by Macaulay put 
together in this country? To him the army is 
simply the natural expression of the vital forces 
of the nation; and just as those vital forces of the 
nation increase so shall the German army and 
the German navy increase. A nation's military 
efficiency is the exact coefficient of a nation's 
idealism. That is Treitschke's solution of the 
matter. His answer to all our talk about the 
limitation of armaments is: Germany shall in- 
crease to the utmost of her power, irrespective of 
any proposals made to her by England or by 
Russia, or by any other State upon this earth. 
And I confess it is a magnificent and a manly 
answer, an answer worthy of a man whose spirit 
of sincerity, of regard for the reality of things, is 
as great as Carlyle ' s. 

The teaching of Treitschke's disciple, General 
von Bernhardi, is the same. War to him is a duty. 
Nothing is more terrible than the government of 
the strong by the weak, and war is the power by 
which the strong assert their dominion over the 
weak. War sets the balance right. And the 
younger poets of Germany breathe the same 
spirit — Liliencron, for instance, who represents 
most fitly that aspect of modern German litera- 
ture. I have not time at this late hour to speak 
of him so fully as I had hoped ; but that spirit of 
war and glory which informs his battle-sketches 



PEACE THROUGH VICTORY 73 



of the war of 1870 — I can sum it up for you. It 
is in the verses of Goethe's Euphorion : 

"Traumt ihr den Friedenstag ? 
Traume, wer traumen mag! 
Krieg ist das Losungswort ! 
Sieg! und so klingt es fort. " x 

That is the spirit in which war is regarded in 
contemporary Germany. And I am not the least 
astonished that when we send over from England 
an itinerant preacher of universal peace to explain 
to Germany, "For the love of God, don't make 
war upon England; for it won't pay you" — I am 
not the least astonished that in a mass meeting of 
two thousand students at the university of Gottin- 
gen this itinerant preacher and all his works were 
set aside. How can we wonder at it? 

England and Germany — on which is Pacificism 
likelier to exercise a deleterious and a dangerous 
effect? From to-day's survey of eternal abstract 
principles, as from last week's survey of ephemeral 
yet not insignificant criticism of England and her 
empire, it becomes apparent that Germany is not 
England's only enemy, perhaps not even her chief. 

And yet, and yet — from those frozen regions of 
the South there seems to come, like a trumpet-call, 

1 "Dream ye of peaceful sway? 
Dream on, who dream it may. 
War still is empire's word ! 
Peace? By the victor's sword!" 



74 



PEACE AND WAR 



the message: The greatness of England still, the 
greatness of England still! — England, for which 
men can die as these men died, with a valour that 
is higher than the valour of the past — a message 
reinforcing again those words of the Athenian 
which at this crisis of our fate I would to God rang 
in every Englishman's ears and were graven on 
every Englishman's heart: "Yet is there time, 
Athenians, yet is there time! Cease to hire 
your armies ; cease to fill your ranks with the off- 
scourings of a planet. Go yourselves and stand in 
the ranks; and then, dying, you shall die greatly 
and with a glory that shall surpass the glories of 
the past, or, victorious, you shall gain a victory 
that shall exceed all your victories in the past!" 



A 



LECTURE III 



TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
I 

Towards the end of last September I was stay- 
ing in an hotel at a watering-place in the Midlands 
when, on a Tuesday evening, there came the news 
of the death of the German ambassador, Count 
Bieberstein, here in London. The incident made 
on me an unsual impression, for it seemed but 
yesterday that he had arrived amongst us, over- 
flowing with energy, animated, versatile, a mind 
full of the future. His coming had instantly 
greatened all our political life; for, in the defect 
of even second-rate statesmen amongst ourselves, 
the presence of a man who, if he did not actually 
attain the first rank, certainly suggested the first 
rank, had given a kind of dignity and meaning to 
political life such as it had hardly known since the 
death of Lord Salisbury. Xow, as by a stroke 
from the gods, that influence was withdrawn. The 
sense of magnitude was gone, and the busy medioc- 
rity, the hustler, and the charlatan, corrupting and 
corrupt, again moved about in unrelieved oppres- 
siveness. Those grave features with their Puritan 

75 



76 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



severity of line we should see no more; his plans, 
his designs, were left an enigma. He had died 
before the great distaste and the great weariness 
had come upon him. To Bismarck and to Stein, 
as to Frederick the Great, life had long been 
infinitely contemptible, the purpose and the end 
of existence a hieroglyph written in mud. But 
Bieberstein had died under the everlasting illu- 
sion, believing that he was doing something, 
realizing some end, and that therefore some 
end could be realized. 

And in the lounge after dinner, amid the gossip 
of the day, there came little splutters of intelligent 
or unintelligent comment on the event; and as I 
sat listening to these epitaphs a lady turned to 
me, and casting down her face and then casting 
up her eyes with a perfect expression of innate and 
indescribable hypocrisy, observed: "You do not 
say anything. Ah well, the news is, of course, sad, 
but we cannot perhaps altogether grieve that he 
was taken. He was dreadfully against England, 
was he not?" "Ah, madam," I answered, "the 
death of a great man is a loss to humanity, what- 
ever be his antagonisms or his sympathies; and, 
after all, next to a true friend the possession of a 
great and magnanimous enemy is perhaps the 
most precious gift the gods can send us." She 
wrinkled her brows; for she imagined, I suppose, 
that by "the gods" I meant the Anglican bishops, 
and was perplexed. 



TREITSCHKE 



77 



An enemy of England? I am not certain that 
this is a just estimate of Count Bieberstein, but it 
is assuredly a fair description of the man concern- 
ing whom I have to speak to you this afternoon, 
Heinrich von Treitschke. 

Almost the last time we see Treitschke, those 
noble features of his lit up, as they always were 
instantly lit up by any enthusiasm, whether of 
love or hate — almost the last time we really see 
him is on an evening in 1895, when, returned from 
a visit to England, he poured out to a company of 
friends all the vitriol of his scorn, antipathy and 
hate for England and for the English, enduring no 
word of comment or contradiction, until someone 
quoted to him Heine's malicious "Englische Frag- 
mented ' in which Heine discusses the question how 
it is that so ignoble a nation as England can 
possibly have produced a Shakespeare. And so 
the meeting ended in agreement and laughter. 
But all who listened to Treitschke that night 
seemed to hear in his words, as they had heard in 
his lectures again and again, the first dark roll that 
announces the coming dreadful storm, the coming 
war — the war that he regarded as simply inevitable 
—between these two empires, both the descendants 
of the war-god Odin, and yet, because of that, 
doomed to this great conflict. 

Within six months Treitschke was dead. 



78 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



II 

How can one best present Treitschke to an Eng- 
lish audience? How can one explain to an English 
audience something of Treitschke' s position and 
the place he fills in German life right on from 1858 
until his death, and to the present hour? The 
seventeen volumes of his collected writings on 
history, on literature and on the science of politics, 
his speeches on present-day questions and his 
political pamphlets, have not been translated and 
are therefore a sealed book to the majority of 
English readers. 

Yet at once in his own personality and as a 
governing force in German thought, Heinrich von 
Treitschke ought to be deeply interesting to us; 
for more than any other single character in German 
political life he is responsible for the anti-English 
sentiment which blazed out during the Boer War, 
which still reigns in German society and in the 
German Press, which in the Reichstag reveals itself 
in the frigid or ironic applause with which any 
references to "our amicable relations with Eng- 
land 5 ' are greeted. The foundations of that 
sentiment, of course, lie deeper than the creative 
power of an individual intellect or will. They are, 
as we have seen, beyond the control of any passing 
generation, rooting themselves in the dark forces 
which determine the destinies of peoples and of 
the universe itself. But Treitschke, beyond any 



A 



ENGLAND'S SEA-SUPREMACY 79 



other German, stands forth as the interpreter of 
these forces. His interpretations have stink deep 
into the German mind; his fiery challenges and 
impassioned rhetoric have coloured German 
thought. Though his greatest book deals only 
with the record of thirty- two years, it is spoken of 
sans phrase as "the History of Germany," 1 and 
"our great national historian " has become a 
familiar periphrasis in newspapers and on plat- 
forms for Treitschke's name. The real and 
abstract principles of German history seen and 
reinterpreted through Treitschke's medium — that 
for many men in Germany has become their faith. 

These are arguments of a unique and immense 
influence. And what are the feelings towards 
England which this great historian and orator 
expresses? He incessantly points his nation on- 
wards to the war with England, to the destruction 
of England's supremacy at sea as the means by 
which Germany is to burst into that path of glory 
and of world-dominion towards which, through all 
the centuries of her history, she has deliberately 
moved. The Ottonides in the tenth century 
sketched the plan; it has been reserved for the 
Hohenzollern in the twentieth to fill in the details. 

J The subject of Treitschke's "Deutsche Geschichte" is the 
transformation of the German Confederation into the Empire; 
but he had only reached the year 1848 when, at the age of 62, 
he died. His " History " may be regarded as the analogue of 
Pertz's "Life of Stein." 



8o TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



Discussing in a former lecture the question 
whether the persistence of war accused humanity 
of self-contradiction or some secular hypocrisy > 
I suggested that in the laws governing States and 
individuals the highest functions transcend utility 
and transcend even reason itself ; that in the present 
stage of the world's history to end war is not only 
beyond man's power but contrary to man's will, 
since in war there is some secret possession or 
lingering human glory to which man clings with an 
unchangeable persistence, some source of inspira- 
tion which he is afraid to lose, uplifting life beyond 
life itself, some sense of a redeeming task which, 
like his efforts to unriddle the universe, for ever 
baffled yet for ever renewed, gives a meaning to 
this else meaningless scheme of things. 

A Greek orator has recorded an incident in 
the life of the Emperor Julian, when, confronting 
certain Teutonic tribes along the Rhine, he remon- 
strated with them on their restless, predatory and 
warlike habits, and one of their ambassadors, 
answering the charge, summed up his defence with 
the assertion: "But in war itself we see life's 
greatest felicity." And five centuries of almost 
uninterrupted war forged the unity of England. 
But no English historian or thinker has spoken of 
war quite as Treitschke has spoken of it. I do not 
recollect a single passage in his writings in which 
the conventional regrets are expressed, or where 
conventional phrases such as "the scourge of 



WAR A NECESSITY 



81 



mankind," "the barrier to human progress," 
occur as descriptions of war. From an early period 
in his literary career, on the other hand, phrases 
of a quite different order abound in his writings, 
phrases in which war appears, if not as "the su- 
preme felicity of mankind, " at least as a great 
factor in the onward strife towards perfection; 
whilst any attempt at its abolition is characterized 
as unwise and immoral. 

When General von Bernhardi, in a pamphlet 
published in February last, ("Unsere Zukunft: 
ein Mahnwort an das deutsche Volk"), puts before 
his countrymen the alternatives of world-dominion 
or ruin, when he speaks of war as a biological 
necessity and as an extension of policy, and the 
manliest extension, he is expressing, perhaps not 
in the happiest literary manner, Treitschke's ideas. 
The poet Liliencron, Treitschke's contemporary, 
has expressed them much more happily, much more 
fervently ; and Liliencron was a poet w r ith a sword 
by his side. He fought at Koniggratz in 1866, at 
the age of thirty-two, and at Worth and Mars-la- 
Tour in 1870. And what is a governing thought of 
Liliencron's battle-sketches, of "Der Richtungs- 
punct," for instance, or of ''Eine Sommerschlacht," 
except the thought of Faust : 

"O selig der, dem er im Siegesglanze 
Die blut'gen Lorbeern um die Schlafe windet. ,,I 

1 "O happy he for whom in victory's splendour 

Death wreathes the blood-stained laurel round his brow." 



82 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



There is no greater contrast in literature than 
between the emotion which pervades Tolstoi's 
"War and Peace," the scene, say, on the redan in the 
description of Borodino, and the emotion which 
pervades Liliencron's descriptions of Worth and 
Mars-la-Tour. And, again I must remind you, 
Liliencron not less than Tolstoi knew what he 
was talking about. 

Ill 

In his own country Treitschke is sometimes de- 
scribed as the Coryphaeus of the Prussian School, 
that group of historians of whom Droysen, Hausser 
and Sybel, Pertz, the biographer of Stein, and 
Delbriick, the biographer of Gneisenau, are per- 
haps the best-known names in this country. The 
greatness of Prussia and the fate-appointed world- 
task or world-mission of Germany under the 
sacred dynasty of the Hohenzollern is the inspira- 
tion of all these men. 

Treitschke's "History" is characterized by punc- 
tilious research and by reliance on original docu- 
ments and original documents only. There are 
brilliant chapters on literature and the inter- 
connexion of literature and history. Here he sug- 
gests Taine, his contemporary; and, had he lived 
another ten years, his book might have been styled 
"The Foundations of Contemporary Germany." 
English critics have sometimes compared him with 



TREITSCHKE AND MACAULAY 83 



Macaulay. Treitschke himself would have re- 
sented the comparison; for he has frequently 
expressed his unreserved contempt for the historian 
of the Revolution of 1688, arraigned his accuracy, 
derided his estimates of men, challenged his 
appreciation of facts, and stigmatized his philo- 
sophy and his outlook upon human fate. He has 
Macaulay's hates and prejudices, his vituperative 
energy; he has his power of fervent admiration. 
Yet as a master of words, a stylist, Treitschke is 
much inferior to Macaulay. His portraiture is 
often an accumulation of minute details which have 
never coalesced into a living personality. A Titian 
portrait beside a Bronzino — that is the quality of 
Macaulay's style beside Treitschke's : for instance 
the portraits of the Whig Junto beside those of 
the men in whom Frederick William IV put his 
trust. Treitschke at one time had wished to be a 
poet, and he had considerable metrical skill. Yet 
in speaking of poetry he is rarely a poet; and a 
comparison of his patriotic verses with "The Lays 
of Ancient Rome" is a fair measure of Treitschke's 
inferiority to Macaulay as a writer. 1 

1 Nietzsche as a stylist might have taught Treitschke much; 
but against the creator of Zarathustra Treitschke was bitterly and 
irreconcilably prejudiced from the very beginning of the former's 
career, when Treitschke wrote of him to Overbeck as "that rum 
fellow Nietzsche. " He even quarrelled with Overbeck because of 
the latter's sympathy with his young colleague at Basle. His 
roughness to Nietzsche in 1872 is not worse than Stein's roughness 
to Goethe, and arose from similar causes. Treitschke divines in 



84 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



On the other hand, one may more justly compare 
Treitschke's immense and enduring influence, not 
only in Prussia but throughout the German world, 
with the influence exercised by Carlyle upon 
England since 1858. 1 And Treitschke's influence 
has gone on steadily increasing throughout Ger- 
many until the present day. Treitschke and 
Carlyle resemble each other in their high serious- 
ness, sincerity, downrightness and deep moral 
strength. Do not imagine, however, that there 
is any further resemblance between them. For 
instance, there is not in all the seventeen volumes 
of Treitschke any hint of that broad human 
laughter which you find in very nearly every page 
of the thirty volumes of Carlyle. In all Treitschke 
I doubt whether there is a single laugh. You may 
say, if you like, that this is because Germany has 
obtained free political institutions so recently and 
therefore has not yet acquired the power to take 
them humorously! 

Treitschke, observe, is nothing if not a politician. 



the author of " Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen " "the good Euro- 
pean" of later works; and therefore the bad Prussian, the bad 
German. 

1 Carlyle was born forty years before Treitschke, but Carlyle 's 
influence was slower in making itself felt; he was very late in 
coming to his own in English life, very late in acquiring his reputa- 
tion. The first thing that gave Carlyle a grip upon English people 
was not "The French Revolution," published by him at two- 
and-forty, but his "Cromwell," published at fifty. Treitschke's 
influence at the universities dates from fifteen years after that. 



TREITSCHKE AND CARLYLE 85 



Carlyle, in a sense, has no politics. Certainly 
England never took Carlyle's politics seriously. 
England listened wondering, sometimes amazed, 
but always reverent, to his moral teaching. Every 
book he wrote seemed to prove the truth of 
Goethe's diagnosis of his character — "a new moral 
force, the extent and effects of which it is impos- 
sible to predict." But England has ignored ab- 
solutely Carlyle's politics, whether in his attitude 
towards the American War, or again in " Shooting 
Niagara," or in " Latter Day Pamphlets," or in 
his view of the careers of Cromwell or Frederick — 
that exaltation of beneficent despotism. Treitsch- 
ke's political principles, on the other hand — 
the doing of great things greatly, heroic action, 
the glory of war, and the day of reckoning w T ith 
England — are the very essence of his power over 
Germany. These principles underlie some of the 
soundest German, and, above all, Prussian thought 
at the present hour, as they have for the last 
thirty years. 

A further contrast between these two men is 
this. Treitschke is ethical rather than meta- 
physical. He has none of those dazzling gleams 
of profound metaphysical thought which con- 
stantly uplift Carlyle. Nor do you find in him the 
poetry of Nature which you find in Carlyle — that 
feeling which gives Carlyle the power to turn from 
the massacres there in the streets of Paris to the 
fall of the autumn evening over French meadows. 



86 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



You do find, however, something of Carlyle's 
vivid insight into character, especially when 
Treitschke has the power of loving his characters 
(and unless a man loves his characters he should 
not write about them). This is noticeable in his 
incursions into English history, and even more in 
his studies of English literature. His sketch of 
Milton is still one of the very finest of that great 
man; and his sketch of Byron might quite easily 
be placed with that of the Spanish writer, Nunez 
de Arce. But, again, that which appeals to 
Treitschke in Milton is the great political rebel. 
It is not the writer of the fourth book of 11 Paradise 
Lost," or of the first, or of the ninth, or of the 
eleventh ; it is the author of that noble pamphlet, 
"The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," which 
Milton sat writing in the very week when Charles 
I was being tried and doomed to death, Milton 
feeling it incumbent upon himself as an English- 
man, though he is not a member of that high court 
of justice, to sit there day by day and night by 
night trying Charles I, as he maintained that 
every Englishman should try the king. So again, 
to Treitschke, with his deep Teutonic moral 
nature, it certainly is not the Byron of what, from 
a literary standpoint, is Byron's masterpiece, 
" Don Juan, " nor is it the poet of " Childe Harold " 
that fascinates him. It is Byron's admiration and 
enthusiasm for liberty; and to Treitschke Byron's 
greatest verses are these: 



THE ANCESTORS OF TREITSCHKE 87 



"Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner torn but flying, 
Streams, like the thunderstorm, against the wind; 
Thy trumpet voice, tho' broken now and dying, 
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind. " 

IV 

Let me now sketch rapidly the life and career of 
this astonishing man. 

Like many notable Germans of the nineteenth 
century, above all that German who is now begin- 
ning to arrest the attention even of Englishmen — 
for as a rule it takes at least half a century for any 
true German thought to cross the North Seal- 
like Friedrich Nietzsche, and perhaps like Ranke 
himself, Heinrich von Treitschke was Slavonic 
in origin. His ancestors were Czechs who mi- 
grated from Bohemia during the turmoils of the 
Thirty Years' War and, seeking refuge from the 
Jesuit plague, found security under the Protestant 
Electors of Saxony. During the eighteenth cen- 
tury they gradually rose in the favour of the ruling 
House. Under the last Elector of Saxony a 
Treitschke became a Privy Councillor. He sent 
his sons into the army, secured for them in 1821 
the syllable von, and before his death had the 
pride or the vanity of seeing one of them command- 
ant of the fortress of Konigstein, which still rises 
in grey and impressive solitude on its tall rock 
above the Elbe. This was Eduard von Treitschke, 
the historian's father. 



88 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



Treitschke was born at Dresden in September, 
1834, one °f the darkest and most disconsolate 
periods in modern German history. The old ideals 
were sinking; the new had not yet arisen. The 
despotism of Metternich lay like a dead hand upon 
Austria and the South; the princes clung to their 
privileges; Frederick William III still reigned in 
Prussia. Schelling died that year, sunk in obscur- 
antism; Arndt was a professor at Bonn; Tieck 
had ceased to write; Wilhelm von Humboldt still 
lived in honourable retirement at Schloss Tegel; 
but Goethe had died two years before, and, a 
year earlier than Goethe, Hegel and Niebuhr had 
both passed away; Stein had died some months 
after Niebuhr in solitude and estrangement from 
his times, seeing not only Germany but Europe itself 
rushing upon the abyss. Schleiermacher preached 
for the last time in 1834. The heroes of the War 
of Liberation were long dead, or lived, an embar- 
rassment and a reproach, amid a generation which, 
apathetic and indifferent, half wished to forget 
their heroism. Scharnhorst had died of his 
wounds at Prague (18 13), in the very hour of 
Germany's glory; Bliicher, in 1819; Yorck in 
1830; and Gneisenau (just when entering upon the 
Polish campaign), a Field-Marshal at last, had 
died in 1831, like Hegel, of cholera, then raging 
throughout Europe. Who was there left to repre- 
sent the past splendours? And in the deep night 
there was not a star to hint the coming dawn. 



HIS CHILDHOOD 



89 



Such was the world into which Treitschke was 
born. 1 

In his childhood everything seemed to mark him 
out as a Saxon, as destined, that is to say, to follow 
a career in that country. Treitschke, however, 
early discovered something that alienated him 
from the career contemplated for him by his 
father. His mother, who was of pure German 
origin, was a reader of Willibald Alexis, above all 
of those tales the scenes of which were placed in 
the heroic times of Frederick the Great ; and when 
Treitschke's own tastes began to form they led him 
as instinctively to the Wars of Liberation as 
Rousseau's tastes had led him to Plutarch, or 
Mirabeau's to Livy or the Rome of the Gracchi 
and of Sulla. He took to the study of history; 
and he discovered in that study the conduct of 
Saxony in the past, the conduct of the Saxon 
dynasty — perhaps the stupidest royal House in 
Europe. He discovered the part played by Saxony 
at Leipzig, and the yet more despicable part played 
at Waterloo; and all that was German as distinct 
from all that was particularist in that history took 
possession of his imagination. 

While he was still a boy his great heroes were not 
the heroes of Saxony; they were all Prussians. 
Just as in the eighteenth century the men of the 
French Revolution found their inspiration in the 

1 Treitschke himself has described this period in the third 
volume of his 11 Deutsche Geschichte." 



go TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



heroes of Plutarch, Caius Marius and Sulla and 
Brutus, so Treitschke found his inspiration in the 
Prussian heroes a la Plutarch, in those magnificent 
figures which fill and adorn the pages of Prussian 
history between 1809 and 18 13. His heroes are 
Gneisenau, Blticher's aide-de-camp, he who really 
controlled Bliicher's actions in all matters of 
diplomacy; and Scharnhorst, of whom he has left 
one of the most powerful sketches that German 
literature possesses. Again, his hero is Stein, or 
the philosopher Fichte, or Moritz Arndt the poet, 
the son of a serf, author of the famous song, 
1 ' Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland ? 1 1 And there is 
significance as well as authenticity in the anecdote 
which depicts him as a boy of fifteen reading aloud 
in the presence of Beust, one of Metternich's most 
repulsive satellites, an essay in the dithyrambic 
manner rejoicing in the downfall of the princes 
and exalting German unity, a unity which is to be 
accomplished "by a race into whose blood has 
passed in their youth the free and bracing winds of 
the Baltic strand. " 

It is while he is a boy also that there overtakes 
him a disaster which tries the steel and stoicism 
in him. He has described it for us in a volume of 
verses published in 1856 — the coming upon him of 
a fever, his slow recovery, and, at last, his astonish- 
ment at the persistent sorrow on his mother's face, 
despite his recovery. He describes his being taken 
out into the garden on an early summer's day, 



DEAF 



9i 



lying on a bench in the sun, seeing the bright skies 
for the first time after what seemed months and 
years. And then a strange thing happens. A 
singular feeling comes over him of a vast and 
unnatural silence. He sees the mounting lark; he 
hears no song. It is a silent universe. Terrified, 
the child rushes back into the house, and there he 
discovers the cause of the persistent sorrow on his 
mother's face. He is nearly stone deaf, incurably 
and for ever. 

His description of the fight within himself back 
to courage, stoicism, and acceptance of life is a 
very remarkable passage in the poem ; and in this 
passage something of Treitschke's temperament 
throughout life is revealed. 11 There are men who 
are doomed to pass their lives on broken wings," he 
wrote later of Heinrich von Kleist, " because some 
malevolent chance has excluded them from that 
sphere in which alone they could accomplish the 
highest that is in them to do." To him in his 
youth that "highest" seemed his missed career of 
action and war. For it is certain that Treitschke, 
compelled to be a writer of books, would, but for 
this disaster, have been a soldier. 

His course of study was the usual course of a 
young German of the time. Perhaps the greatest 
moment in it was when he came to the University 
of Bonn in 1851. There, amid the romance of the 
scenery, the mountains, the distant view of the 
spires of Koln — Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior, 



92 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



the Three Kings — the river, the castle from which 
Roland had started, he knew the happiest period 
of a university life. "He who is not a poet in 
Heidelberg or Bonn," he writes, "is dead to 
poetry." The intellectual activities of the place 
rapidly absorbed him. The aged poet, Moritz 
Arndt, was still teaching history; and one can 
imagine the thrill — indeed he himself has helped 
us to imagine it — with which the young Treitschke, 
with his enthusiasm for the heroes of the War of 
Liberation, first looked upon those high and noble 
features. Each successive phase of that heroic 
action Arndt had witnessed; his own songs had 
been part of the action; he had been the compan- 
ion and confidant of the great minister von Stein. 
Even more powerful was the influence of another 
of the Bonn professors — Friedrich Christ oph Dahl- 
mann, the historian of Denmark. He too, like 
Arndt, had played his part in the War of Libera- 
tion, and at four-and-twenty he had walked across 
Germany with the poet of Arminius, determined to 
fight in the ranks of Austria, since Prussia was still 
too timid or too weak to strike at the tyrant. In 
the young student Arndt kindled memories and 
sentiments ; but Dahlmann was at once an inspira- 
tion as a lecturer and in private a friendly adviser. 

Next perhaps to the influence of Arndt and 
Dahlmann upon him was the influence of the Rhine. 
It is hard for us in England to understand what the 
Rhine really means to a German, the enthusiasm 



INFLUENCE OF THE RHINE 93 



which he feels for that river. Treitschke himself 
says of it, for instance, when he has to leave Bonn: 
"To-morrow I shall see the Rhine for the last 
time. The memory of that noble river " — and this 
is not in a poem, observe, but simply in a letter to 
a friend — "the memory of that noble river will 
keep my heart pure and save me from sad or evil 
thoughts throughout all the days of my life. " 
Try to imagine anyone saying that of the Thames ! 

When Treitschke becomes a teacher himself and 
a professor at Freiburg these are the influences 
governing his teaching. His own career as a 
teacher began at Leipzig in 1859, and he inaugu- 
rated it in a striking enough manner by his treatise 
on "The State. " This treatise might be described 
as an abstract justification of monarchy, just as 
Rousseau's famous Essay might with fairness be 
described as an abstract justification of democracy. 
Like every sincere attempt in the field of abstract 
politics it is full of inconsistencies and contradic- 
tions; but it reveals the central tendencies of 
the author's mind. The friend of Bismarck, the 
apologist of the Hohenzollern and the eager 
admirer of Prussian bureaucracy already an- 
nounces himself. The essence of the State, he 
argues, is power; but it is a moral power, and in 
virtue of this moral nature the authority of the 
State over the individual is supreme and without 
appeal. 

Pour years later, at Freiburg, he gave for the 



94 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



first time the lectures which developed afterwards 
into the two volumes entitled " Die Politik. " But 
the stress of the period speedily tears Treitschke 
from abstract speculation upon the State to living 
politics and to the study of the actions of men in 
the concrete. Bismarck's struggle with the Prus- 
sian parliament is at its height. The safety and 
prestige of the Prussian monarchy is not yet 
assured. The dispute about the Duchies is at 
hand, and behind it rises the war of 1864, and 
behind the war of 1864 and the Convention of 
Gastein loom the war of 1866, and Koniggratz, and 
the creation of the North-German Confederation; 
then the insulting half-maniacal jealousy of 
France, and the war of 1870. 

It is a new Germany, almost a new Europe. 
Since the rise of the Spanish monarchy under 
Ferdinand and Isabella and its liberation from the 
Saracen dominion, and, at about the same period, 
the rise of the French monarchy under Louis XI 
and his successors, no event has so revolutionized 
the European State-system. 

Treitschke had originally been destined for the 
army, and it is as a soldier of soldiers that we see 
him in each phase of those momentous nine years. 
"Lay on my coffin a sword, " the dying Heine 
wrote in 1856. But the war in which Treitschke 
fought was less vague than that dim war for the 
freedom of humanity in which Heine imagined 
himself a fighter. Treitschke was an enthusiast 



THE MAN 



95 



for freedom, as his essays on Milton and Byron as 
well as scores of passages in his other writings 
attest; but he plunged into the struggle to assert 
the Prussian ascendency over Germany with all 
the ardour with which, in an earlier age, Fichte 
and Dahlmann had plunged into the War of 
Liberation. At Freiburg, Kiel, and finally at 
Heidelberg, his own enthusiasm communicated 
itself to hundreds of students who heard him, and 
ultimately to thousands. 

His appearance at this period was striking: a 
tall, rather slim figure, marked nobility of feature 
and bearing, dark eyes and masses of thick dark 
hair. He was sparing in gesture, abrupt and 
effective, more chary of pure rhetoric than Droy- 
sen, more regardful of fact than Hausser. His 
voice was harsh, the Saxon accent unmistakable, 
and he had often to pause for a word. He seldom 
mixed with his audience after his lectures; his 
deafness made this difficult, for, to a man of his 
sensitiveness, an ear-trumpet in general company 
was abhorrent. But this was no real drawback; 
it rather invested the speaker and his impassioned 
utterances with a touch of prophetic remoteness. 

"Is Treitschke an orator at all?" an English 
admirer of his writings once asked a member of 
the Reichstag. "In the sense in which Mr. 
Gladstone was an orator," was the reply, "cer- 
tainly not. In the Reichstag he is always listened 
to with respect ; he never kindles enthusiasm ; and 



96 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



yet, if the art of the rhetor is to compel men to 
action, how many greater orators are there in 
modern Germany, or, for that matter, in modern 
Prance or England, than simply Heinrich von 
Treitschke? When I first heard him many years 
ago I had been reading Palacky's History of 
Bohemia. You know the book? Well, in the 
thick of Ziska's tremendous duel I constantly saw 
young Treitschke — for at that time he was not 
more than thirty — pass between me and the page 
like a Hussite warrior, authentic, irresistible, a 
spiritual fatalist, like Racine's Joad girding on his 
sword in the name of the Lord of Hosts. And see, 
yonder he comes. " 

The excitement, the momentary pallor on the 
speaker's face, proved to the Englishman more 
powerfully than words the dominion which intel- 
lect united to moral greatness exercises over other 
men. He pointed to a solitary figure walking with 
a stick slowly down the shady path of the splendid 
street Unter den Linden. He walked as the deaf 
always walk, glancing rapidly from side to side. 
It was impossible to resist the melancholy if 
penetrating strength in the dark and luminous 
eyes, eyes of a type which one seldom meets in 
England, full of meditative depth and integrity, 
trust- winning. Once, where the crowd was less, 
he raised a soft grey felt wide-awake hat, for the 
day was hot, and the noble forehead was for 
a second visible. Involuntarily the Englishman 



THE CENTRAL THEME 97 



raised his own hat with an instinct of reverence. 
That was in the summer of 1892. 1 

The years in which Treitschke wrote his great- 
est book are also the years of his greatest fame as 
a lecturer. Probably no German professor, not 
Fichte, not Schlosser, not Droysen, has ever 
commanded such audiences. His lecture-hall in 
Berlin did actually suggest a concourse such 
as, in the Middle Age, met to hear an Abelard, 
or, in the Renaissance time, thronged around 
Giordano Bruno or Pico della Mirandola. 

And it was a true message, a "gospel," which 
they came to hear, a gospel which the commonest 
could understand, which the most cultured could 
not disdain. His subject, of course, was History, 
or it was Politics; but through all the mazes of 
historical narrative, carefully documented, fact on 
fact torn from hours in the Berlin archives, and 
amid all the mazes of political speculation, close 
and stern reasoning, sometimes repellent by its 
accumulation of apparently redundant matter 
and irrelevant illustration — amid all this a man's 
soul was wrestling almost visibly to bring home to 
his hearers his own burning conviction of the great- 
ness of Germany, her past, her present, and the 

1 Treitschke's influence in the Reichstag was much greater than 
that of men like Lecky or Jebb or other university members in the 
British Parliament. It was more akin perhaps to that of John 
Stuart Mill when he was returned for Westminster, or to that of 
Macaulay. 
7 



98 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



unfathomable vistas which open out before her in 
the future. 

That is Treitschke's central theme. It is the 
informing thought of each of his distinctive books 
or collections of writings — the five volumes of his 
History, the two volumes of his " Politik," his 
two series of " Deutsche Kampfe, his " Bilder aus 
der deutschen Geschichte," his political essays 
and literary portraits, above all, his magnificent 
full-length portraits of Dahlmann and of the poet 
Heinrich von Kleist. 

V 

Treitschke has no philosophy of History in the 
sense in which Hegel or Buckle or Cousin has a 
philosophy of History. He has come too late into 
the world for that. But in a wider sense, like 
every true German historian, he has a philosophy 
of History. There is nothing in which German 
historians more completely differ from English 
historians than in this respect. No German 
historian is ever satisfied that he has the right to 
teach history until he has acquired for himself 
by individual vision, or adopted from another, 
whether Kant or Hegel or Lotze or Nietzsche, 
some general view, some theory of the working of 
God in History. To him History is a drama in 
which God is the supreme actor. And Treitschke 
has such a vision or theory. 



A 



GOD IN HISTORY 



99 



What, then, did that audience, consisting of 
princes and officials, of soldiers and diplomats 
and sometimes the most prominent figures in the 
Berlin fashionable world, come together to hear? 
They came, indeed, to hear of the greatness of 
Germany in other years and in other centuries. 
They saw pass before them in rapid sketches the 
grandiose or tragic forms of the Suabian and the 
Saxon dynasties. They were made to thrill with 
patriotic pride or admiration when, in speaking of 
a yet later age, the orator described in mordant 
words of contempt or denunciation the desperate 
conflict of France, Spain, England and Holland for 
exterior wealth and power, seeking a dominion 
upon which the sun shall never set, whilst, solitary, 
deep-thinking, Germany is sunk in moral and 
religious absorption, pursuing the freedom of the 
spirit, poring over the abyss of absolute ideality, 
founding a spiritual empire. Or the gates of Sans 
Souci were flung open and it was the great privi- 
lege of Treitschke's hearers to behold its builder 
painted with a Velasquez-like realism and a Velas- 
quez-like sympathy, with profound imaginative in- 
sight and vision. But before all and above all that 
audience came together to hear the story of the 
manner in which God or the world-spirit, through 
shifting and devious paths, had led Germany and 
the Germans to their present exalted station under 
Prussia and the Hohenzollern, those great princes 
who in German worth and German uprightness — 



ioo TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



Aufrichtigkeit — are unexampled in the dynasties of 
Europe or of the world. Treitschke showed them 
German unit} 7 , and therefore German freedom, 
lying like the fragments of a broken sword, a magic 
sword like that of Roland, or of Sigurd, or the 
Grey-Steel of the Sagas; and these fragments 
Prussia alone could weld again into dazzling 
wholeness and might. 

This is Treitschke's governing idea — the great- 
ness of Prussia, the glory of an army which is a 
nation and of a nation which is an army. 1 

A great Greek historian, Dion Cassius, writing 
of the Roman Empire — a Greek historian, observe, 
writing of the Roman Empire — said that his 
conception and vision of the supreme end of 
humanity was the whole world governed by the 
divinely-appointed State of Rome. Similarly I 
should say that this conception of the German 
Fatherland, the whole German kindred, governed 
by Prussia and by the House of Hohenzollern is 

1 To Giesebrecht also Germany is the nation of nations, the 
people of peoples. Droysen is even more explicit. At the period 
of the Schleswig-Holstein war he declared that to the Hohen- 
zollern belonged the throne left empty or occupied by usurpers 
since the death of Konradin. His "History of Prussian Policy, " 
based on lectures at Jena, is governed by a similar idea. The 
last volume appeared posthumously in 1886. It is a pamphlet, 
and false as a pamphlet. It is impossible to read without a smile 
the portraiture of the early Electors of Brandenburg as "creators 
of the German idea, following, as mariners a lodestar, the con- 
ception of German unity.'' 



A UNITED GERMANY 101 



the underlying theme of the Saxon Treitschke 
addressing a Prussian audience. And just as it 
had been necessary that Rome should first conquer 
the world in order to rule it in justice, so it had 
been necessary that Prussia should dominate 
Germany in order to give to Germany present 
unity and future grandeur. 

When Treitschke turns from Prussia, when he 
turns from the War of Liberation in 1813 and casts 
his glance backwards across German history, that 
history catches fire under his pen from the power 
and the illumination of this same idea. The 
whole movement of Germany from Charlemagne, 
the House of Hohenstaufen, the great heroic past 
of the Holy Roman Empire, from the time of the 
Reformation and of Frederick the Great to that of 
Gneisenau and Stein, is towards this consum- 
mation — a united Germany under the supremacy 
of Prussia. And now upon what a career of 
high-uplifted glory shall not that mighty nation 
start! Once united, who shall set bounds to this 
Germany? What dream of the mediaeval em- 
perors, what dream of a Frederick II, "the Wonder 
of the World," of a Barbarossa, of an Otto I, but 
shall be surpassed by this Germany that he, Hein- 
rich von Treitschke, sees arise within the frontiers 
of his imagination, scanning the future, brooding 
on things to come! 

And Fate was strangely kind to Treitschke. 
Though dwelling in that silent universe of the 



102 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



deaf, and threatened in age with the darkened 
universe of the blind, he lived just long enough to 
see upon the silver horizon of the North Sea, and 
upon the more mysterious horizon of the Future, 
the first promise of the German fleets of the 
future. He saw Germany thus fitting herself for 
that high task which he had marked out to one 
generation after another of students — the day of 
reckoning with England, the day of reckoning with 
the great enemy for whom he had nevertheless that 
kind of regard which every great foe inspires, which 
England's strength inspires. And yet his imagi- 
nation pierced beneath the semblance of her 
strength, which to his imagination was but a 
semblance. 

VI 

What are the origins of this antagonism or this 
antipathy in Treitschke to England and to things 
English? The question is worth asking; for there 
is no disputing Treitschke's immense influence not 
only upon his own generation but upon the whole 
of modern German thought. 

This attitude of mind does not begin with him; 
it is present in the Heidelberg School, in Hausser, 
for instance, and in Schlosser; and Dahlmann's 
''History of the English Revolution' ' is capable of 
many interpretations. But in Treitschke the 
antagonism reaches a height and persistence of 
rancour or contempt which in so great a man is 



ORIGINS OF TREITSCHKE'S ANTIPATHY 103 



arresting if not unique. To him the greatness of 
England passes with the seventeenth century, 
with Cromwell and Milton. 

The origins of this sentiment are partly histor- 
ical, partly moral, and, in Treitschke, must be 
sought in his character as a man and as a patriot. 
Britain's world-predominance outrages him as a 
man almost as much as it outrages him as a Ger- 
man. It outrages him as a man because of its 
immorality, its arrogance and its pretentious 
security. It outrages him as a German because he 
attributes England's success in the war for the 
world to Germany's preoccupation with higher 
and more spiritual ends. But for her absorption 
in those ends and the civil strife in which that 
absorption resulted, Germany might, in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, have made the 
Danube a German river and established a German 
predominance from the Bosphorus to the Indus. 

The sentiment has also its roots in history, 
recent and remote. "France," said Bismarck in 
September, 1870, "must be paralyzed; for she will 
never forgive us our victories. " And in the same 
spirit Treitschke avers : England will never forgive 
us our strength. And not without justice he 
delineates English policy throughout the eigh- 
teenth and nineteenth centuries as aimed con- 
sistently at the repression of Prussia, so soon as 
English politicians discovered the true nature of 
that State and divined the great future reserved for 



104 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



it by destiny. Had not England been Prussia's 
treacherous but timid enemy in 1864 and 1866, and 
again in 1870-71, and, above all, in 1874-75? 

But the strongest motive is the conviction, 
which becomes more intense as the years advance, 
that Britain's world-predominance is out of all 
proportion to Britain's real strength and to her 
worth or value, whether that worth be considered 
in the political, the social, the intellectual, or the 
moral sphere. It is the detestation of a sham. 
"In this universe of ours the thing that is 
wholly a sham — wholly rotten — may endure for a 
time, but cannot endure for ever." This is the 
protest of the stern apostle of reality. He fre- 
quently rings the changes on the "nation of shop- 
keepers," pointing with aptness and justice to the 
general meanness and gradually increasing sordid- 
ness of English political life. That which Treitsch- 
ke hates in England is what Napoleon hated 
in England — a pretentiousness, an overweening 
middle-class self-satisfaction, which is not really 
patriotism, not the high and serious passion of 
Germany in 18 13 and 1870, but an insular narrow 
conceit ; in fact, the emotion enshrined in that most 
vulgar of all national hymns, "Rule Britannia"! 

"The nations not so blest as thee 
Must in their turn to tyrants fall, 
Whilst thou shalt flourish, great and free 
The dread and envy of them all. " 



TREITSCHKE'S ANTI-ENGLISHISM 105 



Consider the world-picture which that upcalls ! A 
single island usurping the glory of freedom, sur- 
rounded by a world groaning beneath tyrants, 
whilst she sits in lonely grandeur! 

For Treitschke it is not genius, it is not valour, 
it is not even great policy, as in the case of Venice, 
which has built up the British Empire; but the 
hazard of her geographical situation, the supine- 
ness of other nations, the measureless duplicity of 
her ministers, and the natural and innate hypocrisy 
of the nation as a whole. These have let this 
monstrous empire grow — a colossus with feet of 
clay. Along with this he has the conviction that 
such a power can be overthrown. And with what 
a stern joy and self-congratulation would not the 
nations acclaim the destruction of the island- 
State, "Old England," old, indeed, and corrupt, 
rotten through and through! 

The sincerity as well as the intensity of Treitsch- 
ke's anti-Englishism is attested by the sponta- 
neity and variety with which it finds expression. 
The indignation of Schlosser, judging his con- 
temporaries as Dante judged his contemporaries, 
is a dispersed indignation; Treitschke's is concen- 
trated upon England only. His inventiveness is 
astonishing. Here he takes up a phrase of Mon- 
tesquieu, who in "The Spirit of Laws" makes 
England, so to speak, the hero of that great and 
perfect book, and he turns Montesquieu's judg- 
ment into an occasion for a diatribe not only 



io6 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



against French character in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, but against the whole character of English 
history. At another time he attacks the private 
character of the English in a manner that recalls 
Nietzsche's witty apophthegm, when, speaking of 
the part played by danger and suffering in the 
heroic life, he observes, "Man, after all, does not 
really desire happiness; only the Englishman 
does that," thus adroitly placing the Englishman 
outside the pale of humanity altogether. But 
Treitschke is seldom witty, though often grossly 
if unintentionally offensive. He is as unable 
as Heine to see anything fine in the English 
character. 

"Foreign critics do not like my books? That is 
natural. I write for Germans, not foreigners, " he 
answered with impatient contempt when an 
admirer pointed out to him the injury he did to his 
chances of a European success like that of Ranke 
or Mommsen. And in the love and measureless 
admiration of his own nation he has had his 
reward. 

One final question. When, by the light of what 
is called "impartial history," 1 one considers the 
events of the last century in their bearing on 
Treitschke's theory of Germany's future, whither 
does Germany in that century, at once in politics 

1 Of course there is no such thing as " impartial history," and 
even if there could be impartial history it would be the dullest, 
stupidest thing on this earth of ours. 



GERMAN CONTRASTS 



and in thought, really seem to be moving? In the 
first place, if we contrast the Germany of the 
present day with the old half -idyllic, half-despotic 
Germany of Goethe's great youth and early fame, 1 
of Lessing's manhood, of Schiller's early years, of 
Herder and the Jacobis — that Germany, almost 
patriarchal in its simplicity, quite clearly has 
passed away for ever. Its exclusive ideal was 
culture, not patriotism, and the first word in cul- 
ture always is Mankind, Humanitas, Humanity. 
It was essentially, that is to say, a cosmopolitan 
Germany. Goethe, for instance, when his whole 
nation, convulsed by the war against Napoleon, is 
looking to him for guidance — how does the great 
poet of Germany act? He turns aside altogether 
from the present and resolutely fixes his imagi- 
nation upon Persia! Upon Persian poetry, the 
Persian Divans, the beauties of Jallal'ud'din, of 
Hafiz, of Sa'di! And in regard to Napoleon he 
said to a German friend, "That fellow is far too 
strong for you; you'll never do anything against 
him. ,, But men can now no longer say with 
Jacobi, "I hear on every side nowadays the word 
'German,' but who is a German? I strive in vain 
as yet to attach any precise meaning to the term" ; 
or with Lessing himself that patriotism is nothing 
but an heroic weakness that he for one is glad to be 

1 That is to say, the period in which he writes "Werther," 
the First Part of "Wilhelm Meister," and the First Part of 
"Faust," and those great dramas "Iphigenie" and "Tasso." 



io8 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 



rid of; or with Herder, " Of all kinds of pride I hold 
national pride the most foolish; it ruined Greece; 
it ruined Judaea and Rome. " Gone, too, are the 
days of Karl Immermann, who could never follow 
a political debate because he could form no image 
of such abstractions. 1 

There you have that earlier, and, if you choose 
to call it so, that greater Germany. But what 
Treitschke sees underneath that is the Germany of 
the War of Liberation, Prussia renascent, and her 
steady advance throughout the nineteenth century 
to the present day. And as Treitschke, casting his 
eyes back to primitive German history, sees arise 
there the religion of the valiant, the religion of 
Valour, so now, with this informing thought in the 
mind, we can trace in the Germany of 1913 like a 
dawn upon the horizon, piercing like a sun through 
all the transient mists of industrialism, socialism, 
militarism, the vision of that same religion return- 
ing to Germany — that Religion of Valour. 

1 That was the Germany very largely of Hegel; it certainly was 
the Germany of Kant. And to him also, I daresay, though we 
have no record of it, it would have been difficult to associate, 
there at Konigsberg, any particular meaning with the words 
14 German patriotism." 



LECTURE IV 



PAST AND FUTURE 
I 

In speaking the concluding words on a great sub- 
ject the endeavour to choose from among the mul- 
titude of ideas which throng in upon the mind 
discourages the imagination, oppressing it with a 
sense of the inadequacy, if not the uselessness, of 
any effort to pierce the future or to trace its prob- 
able course in the history of two nations. How is 
it possible to discover any principle which will 
enable us to conjecture, even in outline, the future 
of two such empires as Germany and England? 

I remember that narrative in Ordericus of the 
death-bed of one of our greatest kings, one of the 
most heroic and tragic figures of modern history. 
Dying, he augured of the future; he saw disaster 
descending upon his own work and upon this na- 
tion; he augured of the conduct and careers of 
individuals. The irony in a Greek tragedy, in 
which Destiny seems to take a clear joy in making 
sport of the anticipations and desires of men, is 
not more scornful than the irony with which Des- 
tiny turned to nothingness the auguries of the 

109 



no PAST AND FUTURE 



dying Norman, alike in regard to individuals and 
to nations. 

The temptation therefore is to be silent, to avoid 
any prophecy whatever, to say bluntly and at 
once, "The future is impenetrable, " or again, "It 
is inevitable as the past" — equally inevitable 
whether we regard the bloody strivings of this 
universe as blind chance or as the eternal unwind- 
ing and winding of a predetermined or arbitrary 
scheme. 

Yet History itself becomes mere picturesque 
anecdote as in Macaulay, or an unending series of 
brilliant biographies as in Carlyle, or a staid recon- 
struction of Council or Parliamentary procedure as 
in Hallam and Stubbs, unless, after a long sojourn 
in the past and a steady gaze into the future out of 
the past, the present becomes, as it were, trans- 
parent and the forms of the future, dim and colos- 
sal like clouds or the dark procession of trees 
reflected in water, become obscurely visible. 
Unless the study of the past of two such nations as 
Germany and England, nations which some fifteen 
hundred years ago lived side by side within their 
native woods, enables one to form some percep- 
tion, to attain to some Ahnung, as a German would 
say, of the inward fate which shapes the destiny of 
nations, History itself in any true sense becomes 
impossible. 

In support of this principle I may point out that 
between the lives of nations and of individual men 



DESTINY OF NATIONS AND MEN in 



there is, after all, another distinction than that of 
longevity. The final test is not arithmetic; for 
whilst he who ventures to vaticinate on the career 
of an individual, to generalize upon its future 
course from temperament or from strength of 
purpose, may in an instant be derided by some of 
the myriad forms which " Chance' ' assumes — a 
sudden illness, a street accident, some untoward 
occurrence from the past, the action of a friend or 
enemy — he who deals with the careers of nations 
and peoples is secure from such misadventures. 
In the life of a nation " accident, " or " Chance, " 
the dread mistress of accident, plays a part so 
slight that it can all but be ignored. It is this, 
therefore, which subordinates the history of na- 
tions to law and to cause and effect rather than, 
as in the individual life, to accident. The power 
of cause and effect, however commonly it may be 
talked of, is, in the individual life, a minimum. 
Many years ago Schopenhauer pointed out the 
force of this contrast. War, indeed, seems to ex- 
pose a nation to fortune ; yet Russia is already re- 
covering from the campaign in Manchuria, Mukden 
is forgotten, and Russia has resumed her resistless 
path, slow as the movement of a glacier but as 
sure. 

And there is another respect in which the des- 
tiny of nations differs from the destiny of men. 
In the conscious action of individuals motive or 
purpose is supreme; but the forces which govern 



H2 PAST AND FUTURE 



the action of States approximate more closely to 
the operation of causes in the natural world. 
They can more readily be grouped under laws. 
A science of politics thus becomes possible; a 
philosophy of history a pursuit. Religion is the 
very essence of both; history becomes religion, 
religion history ; for ultimately the supreme Actor 
in history and in politics is God. Time's drama, 
world rising behind world, universe behind uni- 
verse, is His drama ; its theatre this f ar-outspanned 
fabric of star-drift and suns, of fire-cloud and sunk 
system blackening in ether; and here, on this 
planet, great nations, cities and empires are the 
brief embodiments or the transient realizations of 
His desires. Thus the nearer man's portraiture of 
God approaches to reality the nearer will his philo- 
sophy of history approach to a complete harmony 
between semblance and substance, that is, towards 
Truth. For History, the course of events, is not 
the light, but, as its name, ccuopca implies, a 
continuous searching for the light — the world- 
spirit down the ages seeking the realization of its 
ultimate desire, a tragic realization because it can 
only end in the destruction of the world-sours 
Being as such. 

Regarding this universe and man's history, then, 
as a movement towards a fixed end and a tragic 
end, how shall one determine the sphere or define 
the operation of cause and of law in the history of 
nations? For just as from the motion of a planet 



THE TREND OF NATIONS 113 



it is possible to gauge something of its future 
course, so from the history of nations it is possible 
to gauge their course because of this approximation 
in them to cause and effect. But, again, if this 
cause and effect is really to be estimated, measured, 
the utmost care must be taken that it is the true 
cause and the true effect that is examined. No- 
thing is more common in modern times than to 
speak of cause and effect, especially in regard to 
history; yet in man's history nothing is more 
difficult than to attain to something like a just 
conception of a true cause. Roughly speaking, I 
should define any cause to which an historical 
event is ascribed as a true cause when it can be 
submitted to the categories of universality and 
necessity. It must be possible to give a true 
cause the form of a law, and that law must be 
universal in its application; that is to say, its 
operation must be the same in other circumstances 
and even in other worlds, and its operation must 
be inevitable. 

Let me select an example from the history of 
Germany, an example, indeed, from the history of 
the Teutonic race itself. 

In studying so complex and varied a movement 
as the Reformation, if we contented ourselves, as 
used to be the practice, with assigning the cause of 
that movement to Luther's happening to find a 
Latin Bible at Erfurt, and if we then proceeded to 
test that cause by the criterion of universality and 

8 



PAST AND FUTURE 



necessity, we should require to affirm that when- 
ever and in whatever circumstances an individual 
man discovers the original text of a religion, such 
a movement as the Reformation must inevitably 
follow. The vice in this argument is self-evident. 
We are compelled to look elsewhere for the cause 
of the Reformation than in the career of Luther; 
and still less can we seek it in a single incident of 
that career, whether his discovery of the Vulgate 
or his study of the writings of St. Paul. 

If, on the other hand, we affirm that to any race 
or nation, dowered with creative genius in reli- 
gion, which shall, at an early period of its career, 
adopt the religion of a more civilized race, a time 
must come when the former race shall examine the 
truth of that religion and by the mere force of its 
own nature press on towards another, higher 
truth; and if we submit the Reformation to the 
operation of this law and study it as a movement 
which, declaring itself as early as the thirteenth 
century, gradually reaches its climax in the six- 
teenth, and passes into a new phase and a new 
purpose in the eighteenth, then we have arrived 
at what may be described as a vera causa, a true 
cause, a cause, that is to say, which we can imagine 
as operative in all times and places, amongst all 
nations and even in other spheres of being than 
ours. 

It would be easy to illustrate this still further 
by the contrast between the alleged and the real 



DISCOVERY OF CAUSES 115 



causes, say, of the French Revolution, or the 
Hundred Years' War against France, or the fall 
of Rome or of Venice. Only a year ago, in speak- 
ing of the causes of the French Revolution, I 
pointed out how superficial is that view of the 
French Revolution which attributes it only to the 
writings of Voltaire and of Rousseau. How com- 
mon is that explanation! Yet if you universalize 
this seeming cause of the French Revolution that 
too evaporates. 

But if true causes in history are difficult to dis- 
cover, it does not follow that they are undiscover- 
able, or that, in our effort to attain to a perception 
of the deep underlying forces in the inward fate 
and destiny of nations, some true cause may not 
disclose itself and make the gauging, the measuring, 
the computing with regard to the future, something 
more than mere conjecture; and it is this which 
renders it possible to deal with our subject here 
to-day. 

II 

In the present and future relations of England 
and Germany is it, then, possible out of the past 
to discover the operation of such forces or causes 
as will enable us to conjecture the future roles 
of these two nations? 

First of all, it is evident that the region in which 
one must seek them is the region in which Eng- 
land's needs come most sharply into conflict with 



n6 



PAST AND FUTURE 



Germany's desires. And here a law, obvious, 
universal and inevitable in its application, dis- 
closes itself. It concerns the struggle for power. 
Amongst free independent nations weakness means 
war; and the empire which is not prepared to 
defend itself by forces proportionate to the mag- 
nitude of that empire must fall. 

The period at which an empire becomes sta- 
tionary can never be more than approximately 
determined. Thus in the history of Rome it may 
be assigned to the sixty years between the acces- 
sion of Hadrian and the death of Marcus Aurelius ; 
and in that of Venice to the fifty years between 
the dogeship of Antonio Grimani and that of 
Luigi Mocenigo. But in each case that period 
also announces the beginning of the decline; for 
here again nations are subject to the operations of 
natural law, and it may be affirmed that the 
empire w T hich has ceased to advance has begun to 
recede and therefore to decline, and the empire 
which has begun to decline is dead already. 

There comes, for instance, a moment in the 
history of Rome when the question of putting an 
end to Rome's attempt to govern the whole world 
is repeatedly before Roman thinkers and politi- 
cians. And from the first century of the Roman 
era men recalled a strange circumstance. When 
the city was founded the assembled gods each 
gave to Rome some beneficence, some great faculty 
peculiar to himself; but Terminus, the god of 



IS THERE A LIMIT? 117 



Boundaries, of Limitations, on that memorable 
day refused his gift, defying even the master of 
the gods, Jupiter himself. And the Roman au- 
gurers took this as a symbol that in the future 
there should be no boundaries set to Rome's 
dominion, that there never would come a time 
when she should abandon her world-mission. In 
the reign of Hadrian, however, there came at last 
a moment when a term was set to Rome's advance, 
when, from jealousy of his predecessor Trajan, 
Hadrian gave back the former's Eastern conquests 
and withdrew within the earlier limits of the 
empire. And the wits of Rome then said that 
the god Terminus, who had defied Jupiter, had 
yielded most courteously to the Emperor Hadrian ! 

Has such a moment come for England? Is 
there any reason why we should now tolerate the 
courtesy of the god Terminus? Is there a limit 
to our expansion? Until the last decade of the 
nineteenth century the history of Imperial Britain 
is one of rapid and easy advance, in the Mediter- 
ranean, in the Atlantic, in the Southern Seas, 
amongst the Pacific Isles. Did she reach in that 
decade that stage when an empire, ceasing to 
advance, has begun to recede and therefore to 
decline? And was the Boer War a proof at once 
of her weakness and her strength? This is the 
real problem of imperialism in 191 3. 

In contrast to this, what of Germany? I have 
described the attitude of the youth of Germany, 



n8 PAST AND FUTURE 



soldiers, students, professors, politicians, writers 
of books. Their position is clear. "Are we to 
acquiesce," they ask, "in England's possession of 
one-fifth of the globe, with no title-deeds, no claim, 
except priority in robbery? Our greatest teachers 
so describe it." And I showed you how young 
Germans of the twentieth century can, in support 
of this position, appeal to the representations of 
English history by many of the most commanding 
intellects of their own nation, expressed in guarded 
or unguarded terms. They can even cite the 
Englishman Seeley as a witness to the dominion 
which hazard has played in England's uncouth 
and unmerited grandeur. She is the Malvolio of 
nations ; greatness has been thrust upon her. 

And then follows the fixed and inevitable con- 
clusion, now silent but deeply and passionately 
resentful, now clamorous and aggressive, as in 
the Prussian war-party and its adherents in every 
rank of Prussian life: "Is all indeed lost; and is the 
war for the world ended? In the world-arena has 
Germany, like a belated champion, girt in her 
shining armour, ridden up to the great tourney 
too late? Has Destiny, like a herald, by a trum- 
pet's sound proclaimed the lists closed? Must the 
splintered sword which Germany has at last suc- 
ceeded in welding into a solid blade so dazzling 
and terrific — must it indeed rest in its sheath for 
ever? Can the youth of Germany acquiesce in 
this cowardly renunciation and not forfeit honour 



DOMINION OR DEATH 119 

and, with honour, manhood ?" Hence the real 
force and the real meaning of Bernhardi's iterated 
watchword : ' 1 Empire or Downfall — Weltmacht 
oder Niedergang." It is as if he said: "World- 
dominion or Death/' 

Such then is the situation and such are the 
problems which in the immediate future confront 
all that is young, all that is ardent throughout 
Germany, in those teeming cities and towns, those 
universities and gymnasia. Every decade, every 
half decade leaves the question more poignant. 
With every advance in her conscious strength 
which the Germany of Wilhelm II makes on land 
or in the air or on the sea the necessity of an answer 
will become more imperious, the terms of the 
problem more strict and confined, and, other 
things remaining the same, the resultant rancour 
of mind more feverish. 1 

1 Other contingencies than war with England are possible in 
the immediate future. A war with France, as a military critic 
insists, may break out at any moment, and, assuming that Eng- 
land stands cynically aloof, that war, if France is permitted to 
work out her three-years system, may end in a drawn game, 
though by its savage fury leaving both nations so weak from 
haemorrhage that a quarter of a century will be necessary for 
either to recover its prestige. On the other hand, Germany may 
decide not to await the development of the three-years system 
in France, and, trusting to diplomats and to her present enormous 
superiority in numbers, may strike France without a declaration 
of war and overwhelm her by sheer weight. 

This is Bernhardi's interpretation of Germany's duty, for it 
would leave Germany front to front with England. France 



120 PAST AND FUTURE 



III 

Now let me examine the subject more from the 
standpoint of history than that of politics. Burke 
long since deprecated the drawing up of an indict- 
ment against a whole nation, and Sir Thomas 
Browne in a famous passage has stigmatized "the 
sin against charity" involved in all such indict- 
ments. It is scarcely less hazardous or less diffi- 
cult to characterize with sureness the temper or 
the mood of a people in this or that period of its 
history. And yet when such familiarity as leisure 
affords and unbiased inquiry, anxious only to see 
the thing as in very deed it is 1 and as in very deed 
it has arisen, leave a definite impression on the 
mind, it can hardly be a "sin against charity" 



humiliated, the incorporation, on advantageous terms, of Holland 
with the German Empire would be easy. The submission 01 
annexation of Belgium would follow of itself. 

With regard to the enmity between Russia and Germany, in 
Germany's antagonism to Russia there is nothing fateful, nothing 
organic. It is a wound that, as Bismarck once very profoundly 
said, can be cauterized at any moment, because there is not and 
never has been any innate cause for war between Germany and 
Russia. Germany does not seek Constantinople ; her patronage 
of Turkey was the natural reply to the unnatural alliance of 
France and Russia. But the enmity of England and Germany 
is like one of those springs that rise from the nether deep ; the 
more you try to nil them up the wider they become. 

1 To me the most disquieting thing in our relations to Germany 
is our politicians' fixed resolution to see things other than as 
they are. 



GERMANY'S HERO-IDEAL 121 



or render me subject to the accusation of rashness 
if I state that impression. 

Already the minds which determine the action 
of nations, touched with the lure of world-domin- 
ion, compare the resolution and emotion which 
this vision of Germany's future stirs in its devo- 
tees to the emotion and great resolve of Faust, 
when, conquering his past and freed from his re- 
morses, he wakens amid the glittering solitudes 
of the Alps, sees the sun above the summits, sees 
the rainbow span the cataract, and speaks the 
noble verses : 

"Du, Erde, wanst auch diese Nacht bestandig 
Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen, 
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben. 
Du regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Beschliessen, 
Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben. ,,J 

But what, it may be asked, is that highest being, 
that highest ideal? It is world-dominion; it is 
world-empire; it is the hegemony of a planet. It 
assigns to Germany in the future a role like that 
which Rome or Hellas or Judaea or Islam have 
played in the past. That is Germany's hero- 
ideal. It is at least greatly conceived. 

1 "Thou, Earth, this night wast also constant found, 
And breathest, newly quickened, at my feet, 
Already with delight encircling me. 
Thou wak'st and stir'st in me a strong resolve — 
Towards highest being onwards still to strive." 



122 PAST AND FUTURE 



Assuming for a moment that this world-predomi- 
nance is possible to Germany, what is the testi- 
mony of Germany's past to her capacity to play 
this role? You find Germany an empire already 
in the seventh century, if you regard Charlemagne 
as a German — as he was; and again you have 
attempts at imperialism made by the German 
race under the Ottos in the tenth century; but 
most distinctly is Germany an imperial power 
in the twelfth century, in the time of the Hohen- 
staufen, one of the most tragic dynasties in history. 
She then has Italy as her appanage; and her 
record there, under Frederick I, Henry VI, and 
Frederick II, is the record in Ireland of England 
at her worst. 

Again, the history of Germany as an imperial 
power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
centres in the records of the Habsburgs in Italy; 
and it is impossible not to observe that the presence 
of the Habsburgs, of the Germans, as an imperial 
power in Italy, is synchronous with the defeat 
and obliteration of Italian art, Italian literature, 
Italian religion, and Italian patriotism. And in 
the nineteenth century Germany's power in Italy 
centres in the name of Metternich, that minister 
who stands in the annals of European history as 
the synonym of reaction and oppression, the man 
who employed the dungeon and the fortress as the 
chief instruments of an enlightened government! 

Here, then, is the augury that the past affords 



GERMAN IMPERIALISM 



as to the future of Germany as a world-civilizing 
power. Here we have the record of the past — I 
stress the word. 

But, it is argued, this is not the true Germany. 
Those attempts under the Ottos in the tenth 
century, and in the twelfth and thirteenth under 
the great House of Hohenstaufen, are attempts at 
empire indeed, but the German nation as such 
takes no part in them. German imperialism in 
that period is, as it were, forced upon it from 
without. The nation is indifferent to empire. 
The true impulse of the people is to be found in 
the Free Cities, for instance in the Hansa League. 
And the passing away of those early efforts is 
succeeded by a period of purely dynastic efforts 
at empire in Germany, in which the nation becomes 
divorced entirely from the action of the governing 
House, the House of Habsburg. So that, until 
the present time, until, as Treitschke admirably 
points out, the Hohenzollern became the para- 
mount power in Germany, there has been no 
national attempt at empire at all. The true 
German genius, Treitschke himself affirms, only 
finds its expression under the domination of 
Prussia and of the Hohenzollern. The beginnings 
of German imperialism, that is to say, are to be 
found only in the Germany of the last hundred 
years under that glorious House ! 

Germany's past as a world-civilizing power does 
not concern the German thinkers of to-day. 



124 PAST AND FUTURE 



"We give the past," they say, "to England. 
When we speak of empire the empire we mean is 
in the future. You have drunk the wine of 
empire. It is Germany's turn now. And it is 
vain to look back to the Hohenstaufen and to the 
Habsburgs in Italy. Just as it would be vain to 
appeal to England's conduct in Ireland in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the augury 
of England's conduct as an empire in India under 
Cornwallis and Wellesley, Dalhousie and Canning, 
so it is vain to appeal to the past of Germany in 
Italy for any augury of the character of the empire 
that shall arise in the future out of Germany.' - 

Treitschke has defined the aim of Germany, 
and Treitschke's definition, which has been taken 
up by his disciples, is this: That just as the great- 
ness of Germany is to be found in the governance 
of Germany by Prussia, so the greatness and good 
of the world is to be found in the predominance 
there of German culture, of the German mind — 
in a word, of the German character. This is the 
ideal of Germany, and this is Germany's r61e as 
Treitschke saw it in the future. 

For, observe, this world-dominion of which 
Germany dreams is not simply a material do- 
minion. Germany is not blind to the lessons 
inculcated by the Napoleonic tyranny. Force 
alone, violence or brute strength, by its mere 
silent presence or by its loud manifestation in 
war, may be necessary to establish this dominion; 



ESTABLISHMENT OF A WORLD-EMPIRE 125 



but its ends are spiritual. The triumph of the 
Empire will be the triumph of German culture, 
of the German world-vision in all the phases and 
departments of human life and energy, in religion, 
poetry, science, art, politics, and social endeavour. 

The characteristics of this German world- vision, 
the benefits which its predominance is likely to 
confer upon mankind, are, a German w^ould allege, 
truth instead of falsehood in the deepest and 
gravest preoccupations of the human mind; Ger- 
man sincerity instead of British hypocrisy; Faust 
instead of Tartuffe. And whenever I have put 
to any of the adherents of this ideal the further 
question: "Where in actual German history do 
you find your guarantee for the character of this 
spiritual empire; is not the true role of Germany 
cosmopolitan and peaceful; are not Herder and 
Goethe its prophets ?" I have met with one 
invariable answer: "The political history of 
Germany, from the accession of Frederick in 1740 
to the present hour, has admittedly no meaning 
unless it be regarded as a movement towards the 
establishment of a world-empire, with the war 
against England as the necessary preliminary. 
Similarly the curve which, during the last century 
and a half, Germany has traced in religion and 
metaphysical thought, from Kant and Hegel to 
Schopenhauer, Strauss, and Nietzsche, has not 
less visibly been a movement towards a newer 
world-religion, a newer world-faith. That fatal 



126 PAST AND FUTURE 



tendency to cosmopolitanism, to a dream-world, 
which Heine derided 1 and Treitschke deplores, 
does, indeed, still remain, but how transfigured !" 

But what definitely is to be Germany's part in 
the future of human thought? Germany answers: 
"It is reserved for us to resume in thought that 
creative role in religion which the whole Teutonic 
race abandoned fourteen centuries ago. Judasa 
and Galilee cast their dreary spell over Greece and 
Rome when Greece and Rome were already sinking 
into decrepitude and the creative power in them 
was exhausted, when weariness and bitterness 
wakened with their greatest spirits at day and 
sank to sleep again with them at night. But 
Judaea and Galilee struck Germany in the splen- 
dour and heroism of her prime. Germany and 
the whole Teutonic people in the fifth century 
made the great error. They conquered Rome, 
but, dazzled by Rome's authority, they adopted 
the religion and the culture of the vanquished. 
Germany's own deep religious instinct, her native 
genius for religion, manifested in her creative 
success, 2 was arrested, stunted, thwarted. But, 

1 "Sohn der Thorheit! traume immer, 
Wenn dirs Herz im Busen schwillt; 
Doch im Leben suche nimmer 
Deines Traumes Ebenbild!" 

(Werke, Elster's ed. f vol. ii., p. 159.) 
2 Gothic architecture, the abbeys and cathedrals from Burgos 
to Chartres and Koln, are the living witnesses to the Teuton's 
imagination in the new religion. 



GERMANY'S PART IN HUMAN THOUGHT 127 



having once adopted the new faith, she strove to 
live that faith, and for more than thirty generations 
she has struggled and wrestled to see with eyes 
that were not her eyes, to worship a God that was 
not her God, to live with a world- vision that was 
not her vision, and to strive for a heaven that 
was not her heaven. And with what chivalry and 
with what loyalty did not Germany strive ! With 
what ardour she flung herself first into the pursuit 
of sainthood as an ideal and then into the Crusades ! 
Conrad and Barbarossa, Otto the Great and 
Frederick II, Hildebrand and Innocent III, were 
of her blood, so were Godfrey and Tancred and 
Bohemund. Yet in the East, in the very height 
of her enthusiasm, the outward fabric of faith 
sank. In the East where she sought the grave of 
Christ she saw beyond it the grave of Balder, and 
higher than the New Jerusalem the shining walls 
of Asgard and of Valhalla. In Jerusalem, stand- 
ing beside an empty grave, the summits of a 
mightier vision gleamed spectral around her. 
And whilst her Crusaders, front to front with 
Islam, burst into passionate denials and set 
Mohammed above Christ, or in exasperated scorn 
derided all religion, her great thinkers and mystics 
led her steadily toward the serener heights where 
knowledge and faith dissolve in vision, and ardour 
is all. 

"A great hope had sunk; a mightier hope had 
arisen. But, like the purposes of the world- 



128 PAST AND FUTURE 



spirit in everlasting self-disaccord, this hope could 
only be born in the bloodiest strife, and agony 
infinite, and fertilizing hatred and war. This is 
the true import of that long conflict which begins 
with the Schmalkaldic League and only ends on 
the battlefields of Tilly and Wallenstein, Gustavus 
Adolphus, Bernhard of Saxe Weimar and Torst en- 
sen. Rome no longer a guide, Germany was torn 
by the violence of furious heresies, from which 
sprang the wild secret orgies of the Black Mass, 
and that subterranean literature of which the 
1 De Tribus Impostoribus 1 is a sign. 

"The seventeenth century flung off Rome; the 
eighteenth undermined Galilee itself ; Strauss 
completed the task that Eichhorn began ; and with 
the opening of the twentieth century, Germany, her 
long travail past, is re-united to her pristine genius, 
her creative power in religion and in thought. 

"And what is the religion which, on the whole, 
may be characterized as the religion of the most 
earnest and passionate minds of young Germany? 
What is this new movement? The movement, the 
governing idea of the centuries from the four- 
teenth to the nineteenth, is the wrestle of the 
German intellect not only against Rome, but 
against Christianism itself. Must Germany sub- 
mit to this alien creed derived from an alien 
clime? Must she for ever confront the ages the 
borrower of her religion, her own genius for 
religion numbed and paralyzed? 



THE NEW MOVEMENT 



" Hence the significance of Nietzsche. Kant 
compromises, timid and old; Hegel finds the 
Absolute Religion in Christianity; Schopenhauer 
turns to the East and at thirty-one adapts the 
Upanishads to the Western mind ; David Friedrich 
Strauss, whilst denying and rejecting the meta- 
physic of Christianity, clings to the ethics. But 
Nietzsche? Nietzsche clears away the 'accumu- 
lated rubbish ' of twelve hundred years ; he attempts 
to set the German imagination back where it 
was with Alaric and Theodoric, fortified by the 
experience of twelve centuries to confront the 
darkness unaided, unappalled, triumphant, great 
and free. 

"Thus, while preparing to found a world-empire, 
Germany is also preparing to create a world- 
religion. No cultured European nation since the 
French Revolution has made any experiment in 
creative religion. The experiment which England, 
with her dull imagination, has recoiled from, 
Germany will make; the fated task which England 
has declined, she will essay.' 9 

That is the faith of young Germany in 19 13. 
The prevalent bent of mind at the universities, 
in the army amongst the more cultured, is towards 
what may be described as the religion of Valour, 
reinterpreted by Napoleon and by Nietzsche — 
the glory of action, heroism, the doing of great 
things. It is in metaphysics Zarathustra's " Amor 
Fati." It is in politics and ethics Napoleonism. 
9 



130 



PAST AND FUTURE 



These same young men, who, in this very month, 
thrill with the scenes of 1813, see in Napoleon 
the oppressor, but they see in Napoleon's creed 
the springs of his action, a message of fire: Live 
dangerously ! 

Kant's great Imperative was born of the defeats 
and of the victories of Frederick; echoes from 
Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as from Rossbach, 
thrid along its majestic phrasing; it is moulded 
in heroic suffering and brought forth in resignation 
and in grief that is overcome. But in the newer 
Imperative ring the accents of an earlier, greater 
prime, the accents heard by the Scamander, which 
even at Chaeronea did not entirely die away : 

"Ye have heard how in old times it was said, 
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth; but I say unto you, Blessed are the valiant, 
for they shall make the earth their throne. And 
ye have heard men say, Blessed are the poor in 
spirit; but I say unto you, Blessed are the great 
in soul and the free in spirit, for they shall enter 
into Valhalla. And ye have heard men say, 
Blessed are the peacemakers ; but I say unto you, 
Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be 
called, if not the children of Jahve, the children 
of Odin, who is greater than Jahve." 

IV 

The influence which Napoleon exercises upon 
modern German thought is peculiar and instruc- 



INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 131 

tive. In Europe as a whole, in the twentieth cen- 
tury, two great spirit-forces contend for men's 
allegiance — Napoleon and Christ. The one, the 
representative of life-renunciation, places the 
reconciliation of life's discords and the solution 
of its problems in a tranquil but nebulous region 
beyond the grave ; the other, the asserter of earth 
and of earth's glories, disregardful of any life 
beyond the grave, finds life's supreme end in 
heroism and the doing of great things, and seeks 
no immortality except the immortality of renown, 
and even of that he is slightly contemptuous. 
To Napoleon the end of life is power and the 
imposing of his will upon the wills of other men. 
Like Achilles or like Ajax, ever to be the first and 
to outshine all others is his confessed ambition. 
The law, on the other hand, which Christ laid 
upon men appears to be the law of self-effacement. 
The true Christist toils but for others; he prays 
but for others. He suffers for them; he dies for 
them; Servus servorum Dei — slave of the slaves 
of God — was the proud subscription which the 
haughtiest of the mediaeval Pontiffs placed at the 
end of their letters. 

In Europe, I say, this conflict between Christ 
and Napoleon for the mastery over the minds of 
men is the most significant spiritual phenomenon 
of the twentieth century. You meet with it in 
England and in America, as in Austria and Spain. 
You meet with it even in Italy. In Russia Tolstoi's 



132 



PAST AND FUTURE 



furious attacks are a proof of its increasing sway. 
The new spirit in France is its unacknowledged 
derivative. But it is in Germany alone that as 
yet Napoleonism has acquired something of the 
clearness and self-consistency of a formulated 
creed, above all in Berlin and in the cities and 
towns that come most within the influence of 
Berlin. They have not forgotten 1806 and the 
years of hideous humiliation which followed; they 
have not forgotten the German conscripts who 
were compelled to fight under the banners of their 
conqueror; they have not forgotten the 297,000 
men of German blood, who under the Corsican's 
leadership, had, in 1812, to march against Russia; 
nor have they forgotten 18 13 and the tremulous 
awful hour when the destinies of Europe and, so 
to speak, of the world, hung in the balance at 
Dresden, at Kulm, at Katzbach and at Leipzig. 
But, whilst abjuring the tyrant of Germany and 
the oppressor of Europe, they have gradually 
acquired a profound and ever profounder rever- 
ence for the creed and the religion towards which 
that great and solitary spirit, perhaps the loneliest 
amongst the children of men, still struggled amid 
the tumults and desolations, the triumphs and 
the glories, the victory and the disaster of his 
tragic and brief career — a world- tragedy, his, at 
once the Man of Destiny and the Antagonist of 
Destiny. 

More than the Europe of 1800 and 1801, which 



CORSICA HAS CONQUERED GALILEE 133 



saw in the victor of Marengo the Mohammed of a 
new era, the enunciator of a new faith, young Ger- 
many, the Germany of to-day, in the writings of 
Treitschke and of the followers of Treitschke, 
studies Napoleonism, illumining politics with an 
austere and uplifting grandeur. In the writings of 
Nietzsche and of the followers of Nietzsche they 
study the same Napoleonism transforming the 
principles of everyday life, breathing a new 
spirit into ethics, transfiguring the tedious, half- 
hypocritical morality of an earlier generation. 
Remorse for the great error of the race in the fifth 
century has ousted every other admiration. 

Corsica, in a word, has conquered Galilee. 

And the future? All there is as yet obscure; but 
that "empire of the spirit" will certainly be some- 
thing of wider range, of indefinitely wider range 
than the whole of the confederated German world, 
or any idealization of that world, however up- 
lifted or sublime. One mighty issue is secured: 
Germany at least shall not confront the twentieth 
century and its thronging vicissitudes as the 
worshipper of an alien God, thrall of an alien 
morality. Dazzling as Elpore 1 with the dawn-star 
above her brow, the New Germany, knit once 
more to the divine genius within herself, delivered 
from the loathed burden of the past, the cancer of 
the centuries, confronts the vast darkness. 

The role of a new Judaea or a new Hellas is lofty 

1 See Goethe's " Pandora" 



134 PAST AND FUTURE 



enough to stimulate the imagination and give an 
inspiration to the monotony of contemporary life. 
But this changed and changing Europe of ours, 
this changed and changing world, does it definitely 
forbid or nobly encourage that hope? Do the 
present conditions of the world permit of a new 
Judaea or a new Hellas? 

History, I have somewhere said, never really 
repeats itself — except in the leading articles of 
newspapers! But in the years in front, ineffec- 
tively and impotently crowded by Nietzsche with 
his ambiguous caricature, the Superman, a thing 
made by Nature's journeyman — in that future 
what newer path to a newer world-vision, what 
creative, all-informing, all-comprehensive thought 
which shall extort a reluctant homage even from 
the East, may not the German imagination, its 
fetters broken, now carve? Till now all has been 
negative. Chaos has returned; but out of that 
chaos what new and miraculous cosmos may not 
the German imagination raise? 

That world-empire of which Germany dreams 
she may, or may not, on its material side, attain; 
but in this race for the spirit's dominion, the 
mightier empire of human Thought, who is her 
rival? Where even is her competitor? Not 
England assuredly; for in that region England in 
the twentieth century has a place retrograde 
almost as Austria or Spain; not America; not 
Russia; not Japan, with her tasteless, over-eager 



BRITISH IMPERIALISM 135 

efforts to enter the comity of Europe. Is it 
France? . . . 

[The discussion of this question was here broken off as 
the lecture hour was nearing its end; and it is not 
possible to Jill the gap from any notes left by the 
lecturer. The "ambitions" spoken of in the first 
sentence of Section V are clearly those of world- 
empire "on its material side. "] 

V 

If these, then, are the legitimate impulses, the just 
ambitions of Germany — and what Englishman 
remembering the methods by which the British 
Empire has been established in India, in America, 
in Africa, in Egypt, dare arraign those impulses or 
those ambitions? — if these are the modes which the 
"will to power" assumes in modern Germany, 
what of England and those needs of England with 
which they enter most immediately into collision? 

And here it is necessary, as a preliminary, to 
consider the purpose of British Imperialism at the 
present day and the manner in which that purpose 
has been evolved; to consider what the past of 
England and of this empire of ours has been, what 
has been the ideal shaped in that past and what it is 
that has made the greatness of England. 

Now assuredly there was never a period in our 
history when it was more essential than at the pres- 



136 PAST AND FUTURE 



ent that every Englishman should have some clear 
conception of what the words "Empire" and 
"Imperialism" really mean, what they have 
meant in the past. Yet there has never been a 
period in which those words were employed more 
vaguely or more variously; and vague words lead 
to vague actions. England in the twentieth 
century has reached that transition stage in the 
history of all empires when more or less uncon- 
scious effort passes into conscious realization and 
achievement. We are passing, that is to say, from 
the period when we created this empire almost 
without knowing it, to a period in which all the 
latent purposes of our history have emerged into 
the full survey of everyday criticism, everyday com- 
ment. This consciousness or over-consciousness 
of empire is a new phase in the political life of 
England and is of momentous significance. The 
mind of the race, absorbed no longer in the onward 
striving, dwells persistently, at times morbidly, on 
its present greatness, or, turning backward, re- 
interprets the past by the light of the present, and 
in nearer or remoter actions and eras discovers 
purposes which were unsuspected alike by the 
heroes of those actions and by their contempo- 
raries, but which led inevitably to the present. 

In Roman history the age of Augustus offers the 
most exact analogy to the twentieth century in the 
history of Imperial Britain. Montesquieu, survey- 
ing the work of the early kings of Rome, clinches 



ENGLAND'S POSITION TO-DAY 137 



the survey in the fine and telling phrase: "They 
had already begun to build the eternal city. " But 
even Livy, writing his History under the dominion 
of a single thought, is too much of an historian, 
amid all his rhetoric, to ascribe to any Roman 
politician or to any Roman orator before the time 
of Sulla so terse and conscious an interpretation of 
Rome's mission as that which Virgil has placed in 
the mouth of Anchises: 

" Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, 
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, 
orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus 
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent : 
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; 
has tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, 
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos." 1 

There are other points of resemblance. Britain's 
concession of practical autonomy to South Africa, 
before the traces of war had vanished from farm 
and veldt, extorted the admiration of Europe; but 
it has its parallel on an even greater scale in Caesar's 
grant of the franchise to the Gauls and in his 
formation of the Gaulic legions. 

1 " Others, I know it well, the breathing bronze shall chase, 
And from the death-cold marble upcall the living face, 
Shall plead with eloquence not thine, shall mete and map 
the skies, 

And with the voice of science tell when stars shall set 
and rise: 

Be thine, Rome, to rule; nor e'er this destiny forgo, 

To spare who yield submission, and bring the haughty low." 



138 PAST AND FUTURE 



Is it possible, then, at such a transition period as 
the present, which, just because it is a transition 
period, is therefore as dangerous to a nation as is a 
flank-march to an army — is it possible to form any- 
clear conception of what " Empire' ' has really 
always meant to England, whether in extreme con- 
sciousness or in the dark unconscious? Can one 
define with any precision the aims which British 
Imperialism has unconsciously pursued in the past, 
and the ends which it more or less consciously pur- 
sues in the present? 

Let me illustrate my answer by an incident from 
Greek history. 1 On the night before Alexander of 
Macedon started for the East on that career of 
conquest in which, like Achilles, his great exemplar, 
he was to find his glory and an early death, he had 
a farewell interview with the man who had been 
his tutor, now the master of a rising school of 
thought in the shades of the Lyceum. And to- 
wards the close of the interview Aristotle said to 
the Macedonian : 

"You are about to start upon an enterprise 
which will bring you into many lands and amongst 
many nations, some already celebrated in arts and 
arms, some savage and unknown. But this last 
counsel I give you: Whithersoever your victories 

1 [Note. — The authority for this incident in its present form can- 
not be traced; but as Professor Cramb used it both in his writings and 
lectures it is probable that, in his exceptionally wide studies in classi- 
cal literature, he had come across it in some little-known author.] 



AIM OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM 139 



lead you, never forget that you are a Greek, and 
everywhere draw hard and fast the line that 
separates the Greek from the Barbarian." 

"No," answered the youthful conqueror — he 
was barely two-and-twenty — "I will pursue an- 
other policy. I will make all men Hellenes. That 
shall be the purpose of my victories. " 

The wisdom of a soldier for once went deeper 
than the wisdom of the greatest architect of 
thought that Time has known. 

And two centuries later a Greek writer gave 
definiteness to the Macedonian's reply when he 
described the influence of the Greek spirit under the 
Roman dominion as tending to give all men a 
Greek mind, to give all men the power to look at 
man's life, man's actions, man's past and future, 
from the standpoint of the Greek.. 

In the same manner, if I were asked how one 
could describe in a sentence the general aim of 
British Imperialism during the last two centuries 
and a half, I should answer in the spirit of Dionys- 
ius : To give all men within its bounds an English 
mind; to give all who come within its sway the 
power to look at the things of man's life, at the 
past, at the future, from the standpoint of an 
Englishman ; to diffuse within its bounds that high 
tolerance in religion which has marked this empire 
from its foundation; that reverence yet boldness 
before the mysteriousness of life and death, 
characteristic of our great poets and our great 



PAST AND FUTURE 



thinkers; that love of free institutions, that pursuit 
of an ever-higher justice and a larger freedom 
which, rightly or wrongly, we associate with the 
temper and character of our race wherever it is 
dominant and secure. 1 

That is the conception of Empire and of England 
which persists through the changing fortunes of 
parties and the rise and fall of Cabinets. It out- 
lives the generations. Like an immortal energy it 
links age to age. This undying spirit is the true 
England, the true Britain, for which men strive 
and suffer in every zone and in every era, which 
silently controls their actions and shapes their 
character like an inward fate — " England. " It is 
this which gives hope in hopeless times, imparting 

1 If finally 1 were asked when this conception of empire began 
to take imaginative possession of the mind of a great statesman, 
I should point, perhaps arbitrarily, to Cromwell. And I should 
further point to Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren 
Hastings in 1788 as the period when, from being the possession of 
statesmen, it becomes the possession of the nation, shaping its 
counsels henceforth. For, if Burke is a reactionary in constitu- 
tional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet 
of a new era, the enunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth 
century slowly endeavours to realize — an empire resting, not on 
violence, but on justice and freedom. That impeachment antici- 
pates our present policy in India and in Egypt, just as Burke's 
speeches on the American Colonies anticipate the policy which 
underlies our treatment of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and 
South Africa at the present day, a policy which has almost 
reversed an article of faith in the eighteenth century — that every 
colony must, in the long run, like ripe fruit, detach itself from 
the parent stem. 



THE SPIRIT-PURPOSE 141 



its immortal vigour to the statesman in his cabinet 
and to the soldier in the field. A government or a 
minister may seem to have the power arbitrarily 
to provoke a war which involves the suffering and 
deaths of thousands; but it is neither for govern- 
ment nor minister that the soldier falls. Lying 
there in agony, sinking into darkness, he has in 
himself the consciousness of this far greater thing, 
this mysterious, deathless, onward-striving force, 
call it God, call it Destiny — but name it England. 
For England it is. It is for this that on the bat- 
tlefield the soldier fights, in victory or in defeat. 
This is the spirit-purpose which binds century to 
century, making the yeoman who fought to estab- 
lish an empire on the fields of France the comrades 
in purpose of the mariners who founded Virginia, 
of those adventurers to the East (themselves the 
pioneers of the soldiers w T ho, under Clive, Hastings, 
Eyre Coote, Wellesley and Dalhousie, founded 
our empire in India), or of those adventurers, 
again, who settled in the vast loneliness of the 
island continent of Australia. 

To give all men within its bounds an English 
mind — that has been the purpose of our empire 
in the past. He who speaks of England's greatness 
speaks of this. Her renow r n, her glory, it is this, 
undying, imperishable, in the strictest sense of 
that word. For if, in some cataclysm of Nature, 
these islands and all that they embrace were over- 
whelmed and sunk in sea-oblivion, if to-morrow's 



142 PAST AND FUTURE 



sun rose upon an Englandless world, still this spirit 
and this purpose in other lands would fare on un- 
touched amid the wreck. 

To the German accusation cited in the opening 
lecture that in India England has made no new ex- 
periment in religion, it can be answered that more 
than any other conqueror of India she has per- 
mitted the genius of its race to continue its own 
developments, that religious propagandism has 
never formed part of her political creed. She has 
even, at stated intervals, checked the inopportune 
or intemperate zeal of missionaries of her own race. 
And how is it thinkable that an English Shah 
Jehan should ever arise to imperil by bigotry the 
continuance of the British Raj? At moments, 
indeed, this empire seems to resemble a vast temple, 
with the vaulted skies for its dome and the viewless 
bounds of this planet for its walls. And within 
that temple what prayers arise, in every accent, 
and what sound of hymns to every god that, down 
the long centuries, the human imagination has 
created or adored ! 

To give all men an English mind — that ideal has 
been our guiding star through all the phases of our 
empire. 

". . . Se tu segui tua Stella 
Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto." 1 

1 " If thou follow but thy star 

Thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven." 



THE NEW IMPERIAL PROBLEM 143 



And, until now, Dante's noble verse has been most 
strangely, most greatly realized by the English. 
Who shall affirm how long that ideal shall yet 
govern England's actions? 

VI 

With the twentieth century England has reached a 
stage in the career of empire when her policy, 
whatever it may have been in the past, becomes 
definitely a policy of peace, not war, of internal 
organization, not of outward expansion. Eng- 
land's task now, that is to say — if there were no 
other power than England — is the evolution, not 
of an exterior uniformity, but of an inner harmony, 
the organization of this empire that we already 
possess, the founding of an imperially representa- 
tive government. New problems of every kind 
arising from within her own bounds are pressing 
for solution, in India, in Egypt, in Canada and in 
the Southern Seas. How is the central government 
of this vast and complex structure of empire ul- 
timately to be organized? Who are to compose 
the Imperial Council or the Imperial Parliament? 
Upon what principle are its members to be elected, 
and from whom, and by whom? It seems as if 
the political genius of the nation or the empire 
were to be strained to create not only a new school 
of statesmen, but almost a new statesmanship. 
The problem of armaments, due to the transforma- 



144 PAST AND FUTURE 



tion which the art of war is undergoing, is not less 
pressing. If free communities, Canada, Australia, 
New Zealand, South Africa, create their own 
armies and build their own fleets, who is to have 
the supreme command of those armies; in what 
docks are those fleets to be built; by whom are 
they to be manned; and what is to be the part of 
each separate State or unit of government in their 
control? Is it conceivable, if those very principles 
which have made England an empire are to persist 
— the larger freedom, the higher justice — is it 
conceivable that these organized countries, these 
States already numbering some fifteen or sixteen 
million inhabitants, will be content to supply the 
means of peace and war and yet have no voice 
whatever in the decision of peace and war? It is 
absolutely inconceivable. And, again, there is 
that wider and still more intricate problem of 
India. How and by what stretch of the imagina- 
tion is that freedom and justice, in any conscious 
or self-governing sense, to be extended to India? 
And to that problem you can also add the like 
problem in Egypt. These are merely the central 
strands of a complex ganglion of questions which, 
with every year and every decade, will become 
more pressing. 

Freedom a French thinker once defined as the 
power to exercise the will in the pursuit of its 
highest ends without fear. For this alone gives to 
the mind that tranquillity, that " security,' ' in the 



"FRIENDLY RIVALRY" 145 



strict sense of the word — immunity from cares — 
necessary to free operations of the great faculties 
of the mind. And it is this tranquillity, this se- 
curity, that is now above all things necessary to 
England. But it is just this tranquillity, this 
security, which she cannot find. For whilst Eng- 
land may pray for peace in order to shape out these 
problems in politics, there still beyond the North 
Sea is the stern Watcher, unsleeping, unresting, 
bound to her own fate, pursuing her own distant 
goal undeviatingly, unfalteringly, weighing every 
action of England, waiting for every sign of 
England's weakness. It is here that Germany's 
will to power comes into tragic conflict with 
England's will to peace. Here is the element of 
discord — it is not in England herself. What will 
be the issue? 

There the question lies, and it is a difficult 
question — more difficult for a German than for an 
Englishman. To talk about " friendly rivalry" is 
no answer. I never can understand what meaning 
that kind of talk has — " friendly rivalry," "gener- 
ous emulation, " and the image of racers on a race- 
course. Even if such a thing were possible or 
thinkable among nations — and there is no example 
in history of any such " friendly rivalry," of any 
such " generous emulation" — but even if it were 
possible, what is to be the state of mind of a young 
and ardent German at the present day who feels 
within his nation very nearly an unlimited power, 
10 



146 PAST AND FUTURE 



and who sees only one great adversary, one great 
obstacle, between him and the realization of the 
world-ideal of his race? There are tens of thou- 
sands of such young Germans. What are you or I 
to think of them if they sit still and fold their 
hands — in " friendly rivalry," in 14 generous emula- 
tion' ' of England, a Power which is described to 
them by their leaders and thinkers as already 
tottering to its grave? What other spirit is to 
arise within them than the spirit which I have 
indicated in these lectures? 

I have lived amongst Germans and know some- 
thing of the temper of Germany's manhood and of 
her youth. I have read much in her history and in 
her literature. I have been impressed, as with the 
motion of tides and of great rivers, by the majesty 
of that movement by which, from the days of the 
Saxon and the Hohenstaufen Emperors, through 
centuries of feudal anarchy and disintegration 
made still more disintegrated by the convulsive 
forces of the fiercest religious strife, she has at- 
tained to her position to-day; and with the best 
will in the world I can see no issue to the present 
collision of ideals but a tragic issue. England, 
indeed, desires peace; England, indeed, it is certain, 
will never make war upon Germany; but how is 
the youth of Germany, the youth of that nation 
great in arts as in war, to acquiesce in the world- 
predominance of England? With what thoughts 
are they to read the history and the literature 



VALUE OF ALLIANCES 



of their country? If, from love of peace or dread 
of war, Germany submits, it would seem as if her 
great soldiers had fought in vain, as if the long 
roll of her battles had passed like an empty sound, 
as if the Great Elector and Frederick, Stein and 
Scharnhorst and Bismarck had schemed in vain, 
as if her thinkers had thought their thoughts and 
her poets had dreamed their dreams not less in 
vain. But if, on the other hand, Germany has 
not declined from her ancient valour the issue is 
certain, and a speedy issue. 
It is war. 

At the present stage of world-history it is, of 
course, useless to seek a practical policy in arbitra- 
tion. It would be a waste of words even to demon- 
strate the invalidity of this device. Nor would it 
be more opportune to discuss the value of alliances 
as a permanent means of securing the peace of 
Europe. In a treaty with an enemy that treaty 
is binding only so long as you can make your 
enemy see gleam behind the parchment the point 
of a sword ; and the verdict of history upon alliances 
is unmistakable and explicit. Whatever principle 
may govern individual friendships, alliances be- 
tween nations and States are governed by self- 
interest only ; they are valid only so long as mutual 
fears or mutual desires persist in equal force. For 
the friendship of nations is an empty name ; peace 
is at best a truce on the battlefield of Time; the 
old myth or the old history of the struggle for 



148 PAST AND FUTURE 



existence is behind us, but the struggle for power 
— -who is to assign bounds to its empire, or invent 
an instrument for measuring its intensity? 

In this country we seem to be gradually acquir- 
ing the dangerous habit of mind of trusting to 
alliances rather than to our own strength. A great 
nation trusts to itself mainly; only secondarily to 
alliances, however intimate. For deep in the heart 
of every nation lie ancient, strong resentments, 
resentments that at a moment of crisis may flare 
up into ancient strifes. War has often revealed 
antagonisms between powers apparently friendly, 
and sympathies between powers apparently hostile. 
We speak much, for instance, of the Triple En- 
tente ; but of how long standing is our amity with 
France, and upon what foundations does it rest? 
Waterloo is not yet a century old, and Fashoda is 
but yesterday; and some half a century ago, be- 
tween these two terms, the ignoble terror of a 
French invasion created the absurd Volunteer 
System which a not less ignoble terror of Germany 
has recently transformed into the still more ab- 
surd Territorial Force. And Russia? At the 
present hour Germany seems in a state of dull 
hostility towards Russia, England in a state of 
very dull friendship with the same power. Eng- 
land, with her ancient dreams, her ancient tradi- 
tions and ideals of the higher freedom, the larger 
justice, summons the aid of Russia to help her to 
govern, or misgovern, Persia! How can we hope 



WAR OR SUBMISSION 149 



that such an alliance, so unnaturally framed, will 
last? Does it not contain within itself the very 
seeds of its own destruction? And along the 
northern shore of the Persian Gulf or on the 
Afghan frontier we have with our own hands laid 
a mine which might at any moment shatter the 
fabric to pieces. He who cannot take within his 
range a prostrate France and the alliance of Russia 
and Germany against England is not a student of 
politics, whatever else he may be. 

There is possible perhaps for England another 
course than the arbitrament of war. Avoiding war 
and tacitly acquiescing in the role of submission, 
England may adopt a policy of concession to an 
enemy whom she dreads, and, one diplomatic 
defeat leading to another, she may gradually sink 
to a secondary place in the councils of Europe and 
of the world. In such a process there need be 
nothing that is crudely disgraceful, nothing to 
sting to the quick the honour of opportunist 
Cabinets or publicists. The concessions would be 
made at moderately wide intervals, and a people 
sunk of itself in torpor and indifference can easily 
be lulled by the ministerial management of words 
and events. Everyday life would go on as before ; 
strikes would increase in number and the pillage 
of capital be accelerated; sloth would settle ever 
deeper on every class, and, as in the Byzantium of 
the thirteenth century, the vanity of a decrepit 
people would exhibit itself in complacent ostenta- 



150 PAST AND FUTURE 



tion. Thus indeed the fate of England would 
resemble the fate of Venice in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, until some soldier, more cynical or more 
brutal in his ambition, would affix a term to her 
sham independence, as at Campo Formio Napoleon 
ended the sham independence of Venice. 

But is the creative power which has shaped this 
ancient and famous empire really dead? Is it 
moribund, or sick at all, within us? Or is this 
momentary apathy and indifference a thing indeed 
momentary, that shall pass away? 

Even now, even in 19 13, when I consider Eng- 
land and this vast and complex fabric of empire 
which she has slowly reared, its colonies, its de- 
pendencies, the cosmic energy which everywhere 
seems to animate the mass in its united life and in 
its separate States or principalities, all such com- 
parisons with decaying empires appear an irrele- 
vance or a futility. Whatever be England's fate, 
it will not be the fate of Venice or Byzantium. 
And as a proof of the validity of this impression or 
this conviction I seem to discover everywhere 
stirrings as of a new life, to hear the tramp of 
armies fired by a newer chivalry than that of Crejy, 
and on the horizon to discern the outline of fleets 
manned by as heroic a resolve as were those of 
Nelson or Rodney. 

England till now has known nothing of her 
danger. Democratic England has known nothing 
of war. The full enfranchisement of the English 



HOPE AND DEMOCRACY 151 

nation dates only from 1867 and 1885, and since 
1867 what danger or what war upon a large scale 
has the enfranchised democracy experienced? But 
will not the democracy gradually understand that 
its own power and its own privileges depend upon 
the extent to which it takes upon itself not only 
the rights but the duties and responsibilities of 
those who have preceded it in the government of 
these islands; of the feudal barons who not merely 
fronted King John at Runnymede but led the 
charge on the fields of France from Cregy to 
Castillon; of the merchant-class who, in the six- 
teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, 
rivalling in enterprise and daring the feudal 
leaders of an earlier time, outlined the wide bounds 
of our empire in the sunrise and in the sunset? . . . 

[Note. — The paragraph is unfinished. The lecturer 
must have intended to refer to the government and 
electorate which conducted and supported the war 
against Napoleon,] 

But in this is one's final hope: that the English 
nation and race as a whole shall gradually perceive 
that if the task of internal organization is ever to 
be carried out in that tranquillity and security of 
spirit which is necessary for all high tasks in poli- 
tics, England must take upon herself the fulfilment 
of her destiny, depending upon herself alone for 
the realization of a destiny that is her destiny. 

jjC SjC Sj» ^5 9(S 



152 PAST AND FUTURE 



[Note. — was the author's intention to end the book 
with a fuller development of this theme of England 
and her destiny than was possible in the lecture. 
No notes for this intended close of the book exist 
except the following fragment.] 

And if the dire event of a war with Germany — if 
it is a dire event — should ever occur, there shall be 
seen upon this earth of ours a conflict which, be- 
yond all others, will recall that description of the 
great Greek wars: 

" Heroes in battle with heroes, 
And above them the wrathful gods." 

And one can imagine the ancient, mighty deity of 
all the Teutonic kindred, throned above the clouds, 
looking serenely down upon that conflict, upon his 
favourite children, the English and the Germans, 
locked in a death-struggle, smiling upon the hero- 
ism of that struggle, the heroism of the children of 
Odin the War-god! 



4 

I 



